I grew up in Australia and headed overseas as soon as I could. Since then, I’ve traveled the world, visiting or living in 83 countries.
I moved to the United States twenty years ago and have since made it my mission to visit all the incredible parks in my new country.
With over 35 years’ experience in the travel industry, I’ve worked on cruise ships, at resorts and hotels, as a publisher in the travel industry for almost a decade, and as a travel planner who’s helped hundreds of people plan successful trips to US national parks.
I’m also the founder of the international travel publication Travel Collecting, which I created to help people have transformative vacations in which they interact meaningfully with the local culture and environment.
This website is dedicated to helping you plan and book trips to the incredible national parks in the United States. A truly awesome trip to the national parks requires advance planning. Which I’m here to help you with.
In addition to publishing ten national park itinerary planners, I’ve been featured twice in the USA Today’s annual National Park Special print edition, Living magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and CNN Underscored.
My extensive experience traveling has helped me become a travel planning and national park expert and I’m here to share inspiration, tips and resources with you. You’ll discover things not to miss and things to avoid so that your trip is something you will remember and talk about forever.
Why the name Parks Collecting?
One of my main hobbies when I was a kid was stamp collecting. I’d stare with fascination at these tiny pictures from around the world and through them discover the existence of new places. It was the start of my love of traveling.
In high school and university, much of my free time was spent ‘book collecting’, as I read my way around the world, learning more about those countries I’d first seen on stamps. I traveled to Russia with Solzhenitsyn, to Colombia with Garcia Marquez, and to Japan with Haruki Murakami.
I no longer collect stamps (or read classical Russian literature), but I have spent most of my adult life travel collecting – collecting experiences, encounters, insights – and sometimes souvenirs – from my travels.
When I visit national parks, it’s kind of like collecting all those parks for my life experience. You can be a parks collector too.
In fact, you can actually collect stamps from each of the parks and keep them as a memento (it makes a great souvenir of your travels). But even if you don’t do something quite so literal, you may be checking something off your bucket list. Or maybe just collecting new experiences and memories. No matter what, welcome to your new hobby – parks collecting!
Things that I’ve done (and you can too):
⭐ ride river rapids through the Grand Canyon
⭐ wade through a river in a narrow slot canyon in Zion
⭐ hike among the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon
⭐ learn about the incredible history at Mesa Verde
⭐ kayak around the islands of Acadia
⭐ dive through giant kelp forests in the Channel Islands
⭐ walk inside a hollow giant tree in Sequoia
⭐ explore the tide pools in Olympic
and much more!
Happy Collecting!
James
Read more: About Parks Collecting