State Passports: Collecting Stamps at Each Park
Jason & Lisa McEwenDescription
As you travel in your RV, how do you mark your journey? Every RVer seems to have their own preference. Maybe you put a sticker on a state map for every state you travel through, or maybe you keep a camping journal to capture and remember your RV trips. RV Lifestyle and Repair contributors Lisa and Jason McEwen use state-specific passports.
What’s an RV passport?
There are many different types of passports that you can purchase, but the idea behind them is to collect a stamp at each location you visit.
The McEwens have a state-specific passport for their home state of Florida. Inside the passport, each page is dedicated to a state park. You’ll find a picture of the park, along with a description, and a place for park rangers to place a stamp.
What’s the benefit of using a passport?
Passports are a fun way to document your journey. For the McEwens, the passport has become a ritual of sorts. As they RV with kids, the girls take the book to the ranger station to collect a stamp, then they use a pen to write the date of their visit.
Every time they collect another stamp, they usually flip through the pages, which often starts conversations about the trips we’ve taken or the ones we’d like to plan next.
Where can you find passports?
The state park system usually sells them online, or you can pick one up at a ranger station. Some states don’t call them a passport, they might call them a stamp book or a guide book, so try to search for those, too.
If your state doesn’t have a passport, you can check out Amazon. It has several different passports, some of which are state-focused. You can even find a passport for the National Parks, so you can collect stamps as you visit those parks as well.
Hey, our viewers, I'm Lisa mcewen. Thanks for checking out R V lifestyle and repair. As you guys know, we are weekend warrior type campers, which essentially means we love to take long weekends with our girls and we even try to schedule in a few extra breaks when the girls have a longer break from school, like over spring break or Christmas. Our girls a and Riley love R V just as much as we do. But one of the things that we really like to do with girls is collect stamps inside this passport.
If you take a look inside here, this one is Florida specific and this entire book has a list of all of the state campgrounds in the state of Florida. So every time we visit a new one, we go to a ranger station and we get a stamp for that park. The idea being that you will visit all of the parks and fill the book with stamps. Look everybody, we got a new stamp, but we wanted to get the stamp, of course, for our passport. So I went inside and you can see we got it all stamped and ready to go.
So it's another park that we've got a stamp for in our passport. We just got a stamp from Sebastian Inland State Park. Most states sell a passport like this inside the passport. You usually find a map of the state with all of the campgrounds listed in this passport. The state is broken up into sections like northeast or southwest.
Each state park has a page of its own with a picture description and a place for a stamp in Florida. There are 175 state parks to visit. We keep the passport right in our glove box. So when we make a stop to a new state park, we have it with us. So where can you get your hands on one of these cool passports?
Well, the first place I would look would be online a lot of times the state campground systems actually sell them on their website. So check there first, you could also consider popping into a ranger station or a gift shop at one of the state campgrounds and asking the folks that work there if they sell them. Now. Not to worry, if you can't manage to find one at a store, you can certainly find one online, but sometimes they're not called passports. They might be called a guide book or a stamp book.
Keep that in mind as you're doing a search. But Amazon is always a great place to look. If you take a look at the options that are on Amazon. You can certainly find some that are state focused, even some that are focused on the National Park. So you can go ahead and collect stamps as you visit each one of the National Parks as well.
We encourage you to get the passports to the states that you are closest to. So we live in Florida. So of course, we have one for the state of Florida, but we also have some for neighboring states as well. Right, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia. So we've got those in our collection to because those are the places that we head to the most.
We think that collecting these passport stamps is a really cool way to preserve some memories. And it's just another reason to get excited about going out on your R V travels. So the next time you are at a state campground, consider popping into a ranger station and seeing if you can't get your own stamp book to get your collection started.
Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.
Already a member? Sign in
No Responses to “State Passports: Collecting Stamps at Each Park”