Fill in the Blank

Hi readers! Time for some audience participation. Please fill in the rest of this sentence:
“The first national park that I remember visiting was...”

Feel free to go into detail if you want, but it’s not necessary. Just post your response in the comment link below.

Here’s mine.
“The first national park that I remember visiting was… Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore”

My uncle has worked as park ranger there for as long as I can remember and I loved my summers as a kid exploring the outdoors of Michigan’s upper peninsula. From 3rd-5th grade, I participated in a two-week long environmental day camp where every day was a wonderful hands-on field trip: putting on fishing waders and electrocuting invasive sea lampreys, spending an afternoon canoeing to count painted turtles, using radio collars to track down some sort of grouse, examining carnivorous plants in bogs. My cousin and I would come home from these excursions and our jeans would absolutely be plastered in mud and our shoes full of water.

It never really occurred to me until later that what I thought was just playing around and having fun outside was what scientists were doing as their fieldwork. I imagine that this type of story is fairly common among my co-workers. I’m also fortunate that I’ve had opportunities to come full circle, where I was the educator and able to introduce a new generation of children to the outdoors.