under my nose

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)