If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you might have guessed that I have a thing for the US National Parks. WA state contains three of them—Mount Rainier, the North Cascades, and Olympic—and I hiked in all many times while I lived there. During my years in the US, I also traveled to national parks and monuments in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. And last autumn, MAC and I visited Acadia in Maine.
My love for national parks actually started in 1986 when I worked during the summer in Waterton Lakes NP in southern Alberta. Waterton is part of a UNESCO peace park with Glacier NP on the other side of the border in Montana. When I said goodbye to the mountains to finish university on the east coast, I was already regretting that I hadn’t consumed less alcohol and logged more miles on the trails. In my favoUrite hiking photo from that summer, I’m wearing my trendy Patagonia short shorts and A TON of eye liner.
Lately, asking myself what I’m missing and how I can have more fun produces happy memories of parks, hiking, and camping. Not planning to travel outside the Atlantic Provinces anytime soon, I’ve realized the solution is under my nose: five Canadian National Parks all within a day’s drive that I haven’t explored for 20-30 years. And when I’m ready to go a bit farther, there is the only Canadian province I have never been to—Newfoundland—and the fjords of Gros Morne.
I haven’t put up hiking photos in the apartment (or previously in the tiny house) for fear of living in the past but I see now that was wrong. My mind is going to be wherever it is going to be whether I stick up mementoes or not. I also acknowledged a minimizing mistake: Before moving east, I recycled all the US National Park brochures I had collected. I discounted how good it feels to hold these small souvenirs of where I’ve been rather than look at the info online. I miscalculated what would make me sad or happy. Last week, I arranged a few park postcards on my fridge as a prompt to have fun, not as a way to live in the past. I remembered a Parks Canada pin I had when I was at Waterton that is considered RETRO now (of course) and looked through three bins until I found it.
On the way home from Acadia last year, MAC and I drove through Fundy NP in New Brunswick. My feeling with the parks here in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI has been that they’re familiar to me. I have gone to some since I was a child. But a pandemic is cause not to take anything for granted. I bought a book on the Canadian National Parks to motivate me this winter. Since it looks like I’m staying put for a while, it’s time for me to rediscover my local parks.
References and related links:
- MAC: mon amie Caroline.
- PEI: Prince Edward Island.
- Grand-Pré National Historic Site (Parks Canada)
- Fundy National Park (Parks Canada)