Begin Preserving Your Junior Ranger Adventure Memories Now with the Ranger Trek™ Expedition Journal
A unique keepsake to store, protect and display your completed National Park Service (NPS) Junior Ranger booklets, certificates and photo and journaling memories of your Junior Ranger adventures.
Do you enjoy visiting the U.S. National Parks? While visiting the parks do your children or grandchildren participate in the Junior Ranger Program? If you’re like me and you answered yes to both of those questions then you’re going to want to hear about the newest product for preserving your Junior Ranger adventure memories.
I’ve been taking my children on road trips to visit our national parks for over the last 10 years. We have visited over 150 National Park Service sites in 48 states and each of my children has completed over 140 Junior Ranger Programs. In our travels, from each park we’ve visited we have accumulated Junior Ranger booklets, Junior Ranger certificates, photo memories, travel diary entries, and memories that we will all cherish and treasure for a lifetime. The Junior Ranger booklets are filled with a compilation of what my children learned at that park including their thoughts, drawings, questions, answers, opinions etc.. However at the end of each road trip all of the aforementioned treasures and keepsakes ended up filed away in a box in a closet.
Completing all those Junior Ranger Programs is a huge accomplishment and I wanted a way that my children could display all of their work proudly. I also wanted a solution that would organize the Junior Ranger booklets so that they could be easily referenced for school projects and papers. I am a scrapbooker and so I looked for a scrapbook that I could use to store, protect and display all my kids Junior Ranger booklets. However, traditional scrapbooks are designed to only hold photos and other scraps of memorabilia. They aren’t designed to store and display Junior Ranger booklets which are thicker, multi-page workbooks. Finally I decided to design a journal that combined traditional scrapbook pages for photo memorabilia and journaling as well as the capacity to store, protect and display the Junior Ranger booklets that my kids complete and the certificates they are awarded. Hence, the Ranger Trek™ Expedition Journal.
Each journal contains 40 – 12” x 9” scrapbook pages to capture all your favorite memories, highlights of the parks and great photos from 10 NPS sites. There are 4 Activity pages per site.
The professionally illustrated activity pages can be used to scrapbook photos and other mementos, draw or color on and journal about each site visit. Additionally, there are 20 clear plastic sleeves to store and protect 10 Junior Ranger booklets and 10 certificates. Ten of the sleeves have a secure top so that booklets that are smaller than 8 ½” x 11” don’t slide out when you’re turning the pages.
The Ranger Trek™ Expedition Journal can be filled out either by the child or their parent or grandparent or better yet you can fill it out together. Parents who enjoy taking pictures and scrapbooking will love using their creativity to fill out the pages for the family to look back on for years to come.
Children who are old enough to write will love to journal about their explorations. A child’s own thoughts and reflections on what they are discovering are so fun to read and can be so enlightening. On a couple of road trips that my family took I encouraged my children to journal about each park we visited. Just the other day we were looking back at one of my daughter’s journals from a past trip. I was laughing so hard I could hardly speak. The memories of the trips we took together are wonderful and to have my children’s own recorded recollections of our trips to look back on is priceless.
Besides creating an incredible family keepsake, something else happens as you create your Ranger Trek™ Expedition Journal. When you and/or your children are memorializing your park visit, the act of writing, journaling and scrapbooking results in you and them solidifying in your minds all the fascinating things you learned at the parks you visited.
The Ranger Trek™ Expedition Journals are proudly manufactured in the U.S.. They are slightly smaller than a typical 12” by 12” traditional scrapbook size. The cover is a soft, robust, supported leatherette material giving the binder a rich feel and making it something you’ll be proud to display on your bookshelf or coffee table or to take with you while traveling to each NPS site.
One of the most valuable features included in the Ranger Trek™ Expedition journal is a comprehensive checklist of ALL the Junior Ranger Programs that have been identified to be available at NPS sites. The Junior Ranger Program list is sorted by state and region to make trip planning easy so that you don’t miss out on any Junior Ranger Programs available in the area you are visiting. This used to happen to me at least once per trip before I made the list which was very frustrating as it’s not like I can just easily travel back to any part of the country to do the Junior Ranger program that we missed.
Did you know that there are over 400 National Park Service sites? The list is also helpful in bringing to your attention the many parks that you may not have known about. I’m always amazed when I discover a new park that I didn’t know about before. There are so many hidden gems even in the National Park Service. This last summer we visited a park that I’d never heard of before called Johnstown Flood National Memorial in Pennsylvania. The story of the disaster that occurred there is one of the most incredible and sad stories I’d ever heard. Even more amazing was the fact that I hadn’t learned about the story before that in school or anywhere.
We hope you are encouraged to begin a legacy with your family of visiting the amazing places, learning about our nation’s history, and exploring the world we live in. Create a tradition that will be cherished by your children and grand-children as they grow up that will be passed down to future generations. And while you are out there visiting the national parks make sure to capture and preserve these precious memories while they are fresh before they are lost forever.
