PostStreak

Our 50 month streak of collecting stamps was with our daughter Chrissy's passport book. There were two separate occasions during the streak that stamps were obtained without Chrissy being present.

We consider these three stamps as being part of our grand total - but not part of the streak.

Our third child, Elizabeth, was born in September of 2001. Less then two months later she was introduced to the stamp program when we took a driving trip along the Natchez Trace Parkway.
Now we all have bulging passport books with larger spiral bindings to accommodate all of the
extra pages that we have incorporated into them. We now are having fun going back to
the places we've been to so that we can fill up Lizzy's book and Tommy's book with the
stamps we got before they were born.

We collected 24 passport stamps in November, 2001. This was our highest
one month total since June, 1997 when we collected 25. Our total stamp
count at the end of 2001 was 188 - about thirty more than Grandpop.

In May, 2002 we visited The Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was here that we got one of the hardest
stamps to collect. We needed two boats, a full can of mosquito
repellant, and lots of patience to get the Portsmouth Village stamp at Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Between May 9th and May 26th we put 5309 miles on our van while driving out to Wyoming to visit Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. We collected 26 new passport stamps - our most ever in one month. Tommy and Lizzy each got 29 new stamps as they had never been that far west. We somewhat followed as many as five National Historic Trails on the way home and had several opportunities to collect the exact same stamp at more than one location, but instead of filling up our book with duplicate stamps I chose to only get a repeat stamp if we were in a different geographic region of the country.

To view some photographs of our trip to Wyoming please

We added one more stamp to our record month's total when we drove to Millersville, MD to see the traveling Corps Of Discovery II. This is the Federal Government's contribution to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition.

The convention stamp was made specially for a group of collectors that got together to meet one another.

Thanks in part to the passport stamp message boards found on the internet we found out about some newly produced stamps in Washington, DC and two new stamps in Hagerstown, MD. At he end of August we spent a rainy day tracking down the Washington, DC stamps and at the beginning of November another rainy day was spent acquiring some new stamps along the C&O Canal corridor in Maryland and West Virginia.

In July, 2004 we drove out to Rocky Mountain National Park to attend the Second Annual Passport Stampers Convention. This was also the organizational meeting for the National Park Travelers Club for which I was voted in as President. This years convention was much larger and more involved than last years was. We had two speakers, a trivia contest, and the adoption of the constitution for the club. We also stamped our books with the official convention passport stamp that was only available for one day and then retired. Quite a rare stamp indeed!

The National Park Travelers Club is open for all to join. To join the club or just read more about it and other passport stamp related material, including the "Master List" of EVERY stamp available throughout the United States, please visit our website at www.parkstamps.org. There is also a place to post messages and photos for others to see.

After collecting 32 new stamps in July, our most ever in one month, we took a day trip to Washington, DC where we picked up 15 new stamps in one day. This eclipsed our previous daily record of 13 which we also got in Washington, DC on November 26, 1998. There are still alot of stamps left in DC which we still need to get. New stamps are appearing all the time so we may never get everyone!

The Summer of 2005 was very busy, travel-wise for us. The last week of July we drove to Walt Disney World and visited two parks that we had never been to before. The next week found us traveling to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky for the 3rd Annual Passport Stampers Convention and the week following that we traveled to Maine and spent a week at Acadia National Park.

On our way to Acadia National Park, we stopped to pick up some new stamps from parks we had already visited. Parks regularly change the stamps they have when they get worn out, broken or lost. Many times the wording or whether or not the words are capitalized, can make for a new stamp. While at Acadia, we acquired many new, place-specific stamps that did not exist when we visited that park six years ago. That park went from having one stamp to having ten stamps!

In November, 2005, I flew west to Arizona and New Mexico, by myself, in hopes of collecting enough stamps and visiting enough parks to achieve gold level Master Stamper status for the National Park Traveler Club's annual contest. Just four days later I spent the day in Washington DC collecting a few more stamps to put me over the top for the contest. In just one week's time, I collected 38 stamps - a record amount for me for one month!

The Pennsylvania Avenue NHS stamp is the 400th unique stamp in our collection. New stamps, and stamps with minor changes keep appearing in Washington DC all the time. We need to re-check sites already visited to see if the stamp has indeed changed.

In 2006 the National Park Travelers Club Convention was held at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We visited both National Lakeshores in Michigan
back in 2000 but did not collect nearly as many
stamps as this time around. The Master List, hosted by www.parkstamps.org, continues to be an
invaluable tool for stamp collectors.

Sometimes passport stamps can be found at places other than NPS run sites. Both "Ice Age" stamps and
both "I&M Canal" stamps were found at either State Parks or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Visitor Centers.

We took another trip to Disney World this year and flew. What better way to pass the time during our three hour layover than to hire a cab to take us into downtown Atlanta to visit a new unit for us and to pick up two stamps?

The 5th Annual Passport Stampers Convention was held on August 18, 2007 at Olympic National Park. Our entire family started our trip to Washington State by camping at Delaware Water Gap NRA on Saturday, August 11. On Thursday

August 16, we packed up our tent and drove a short distance to Bethlehem, PA to drop Chrissy, Tommy, and Lizzy of at their Gram's house. Barb and I then took a plane to Seattle and rented a car to drive up to the convention. We flew home on the Tuesday after the convention and exactly one week after the annual meeting, the kids and I spent the day in Washington, DC collecting more stamps. August 2007 was a record breaking month with more stamps collected in it than any other month - 53 stamps!

On May 21, 2008 we acquired our 500th passport stamp, the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. In July we toured a few of the new stamping locations in the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area. There are several dozen new passport locations throughout the heritage area - enough to keep us busy for years!