Guest Author - Vanessa Shields

I created a ‘passport’ that included all the museums, nature centers, zoos and historical sites within a two-hour drive of my house. I live in a part of the country that has many wonderful natures centers, museums and historical sites yet you will not find many people traveling here to visit them. In fact, I have only seen one recognized outside of the area. Most people who live here are unfamiliar with the ones that are not right in their immediate vicinity unless they have an older child who went with a friend or heard about it through a public school field trip.

I created this activity for three reasons.
One, we always plan on going to the many wonderful museums and historical sites but we rarely go to more then two a year.
Two, when we do go we rarely talk about what we saw and learned after we get home.
Three I wanted my son to have want to go and to have a keepsake from his trip.
-Something more then the picture I took that are on my hard drive because I will never get them printed unless I am going to do something with them.

I have found 25 sites within 30 minutes of my house and I’m still finding more that are not as close. I knew there were a lot I just never dreamed there were so many!

So how do you find out what is near you?
Check the website for your county. Go to Parks and Recreation and look for “Historical Sites”.

Next check the websites for surrounding counties. If you do not already know the counties web site Google the county and state and it will come up.
Check with the visitor bureau. Look up the conservation department for your state. Find the tourist websites for your city and surrounding cities. You may be surprised at what you will find!

I called ahead to see if any of the places had a stamp or sticker. Almost all the locations I called had something. For those locations that do not you can tape a business card or a picture from a brochure.

For those of you who are interested in doing something a bit more you can do what I did. I am taking a picture, adding the name of the location and resizing it so that the image is an inch squared and printing them out a sheet of sticker paper. I cut out the one to the place we are going when we are going and my son adds it to his page.

To create the book you have a couple of choices. My son is still young and having a passport that is the size of an actual passport was just too small. So I created the one we are using Word and printed front and back and just folded in half and stapled it together. I placed the ‘stamp’ page in the center and I made each square one inch.

For those of you who do not have Microsoft Word 2002 or higher you will have to manually create the layout for your book. I found some great directions online. http://www.pueblo60.k12.co.us/docsvc.nsf/af026903512261a587256e210053f8dc/$FILE/FoldedBookletInstructions.pdf