I have never visited the National Parks and so I decided that 2016 was the year. I didn’t realize when I started planning that 2016 was the centennial of the National Park Service. My partner Mary and I first flew to Los Angeles for our grandson’s 10th birthday. We had a great visit with the family, including his 3-year-old little brother and both my adult sons. On Saturday, I had coffee with Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the UTLA, and learned about his views on the issues in Los Angeles and California.

On Sunday night, after my grandson’s birthday party, I felt very lethargic and realized I was coming dowm with Flu-like symptoms. We flew to Las Vegas on Monday, and I was very sick indeed. Our friends Ted and Ray met us in Las Vegas. Ted is a professional cellist, and Ray is a retired New York City elementary teacher. Both are great travel companions. I stayed in bed while the others went to see Cirque d’Soleil. I heard it was spectacular. We were in Las Vegas for two more days. I rested in the hotel room, went out at night to see an amazing young magician-illusionist named Mat Franco. We couldn’t figure out how he did his tricks. He was fabulous. The third night we saw Lionel Ritchie, a singer we all loved but found the show very disappointing. He is a legend, a wonderful singer, and a composer of songs. But his band was so over-miked that it drowned out his voice. And the production was unnecessarily flamboyant, including pyrotechnics (which terrify me in an enclosed space and diverted attentiom from his music.) I’m not a gambler, but I dropped a few dollars into the slots and won about $15. I walked away with it before the house won it back.

The high point of my Las Vegas portion of the trip was meeting Angie Sullivan, who is a second-grade teacher in Clark County (Las Vegas) public schools. She got stuck in traffic and we barely got to speak, but we hugged and took pictures. Angie is my favorite source of news about education in Nevada. She keeps track of school board decisions, the legislature’s hearings and actions, the Governor’s actions. She sends out an email from time to time about what’s happening. It seems to reach every legislator, every journalist, and school board member in the state. She fights for the kids. She is the conscience of the state. She calls out the legislators and governor for ignoring the children who are poor and don’t speak English, this in a state where the casinos, tourism, mining, tech companies, and other industries are rolling in dough. The displays of conspicuous consumption exist side by side with underfunded schools for the children of the people who staff the tourism industry and do the low-wage jobs. When she was late, I was sitting with two of her friends at a coffee shop, and Angie kept sending texts about her progress. They said, “Angie’s crying now. Angie cries easily. Angie is passionate.” My friends were texting me that I was very late for dinner. But I couldn’t leave without hugging Angie.

On Thursday the 29th, we rented a car and drove to Zion National Park. It was astonishingly beautiful. I could not believe that I waited so long to see this great national treasure. The National Parks are our common heritage, like our public schools. I decided to tweet photographs everyday of the beauty I saw, along with a message that I gladly pay federal taxes to preserve our parks for future generations, But Donald Trump doesn’t. Selfish, greedy so-and-so.

From Zion, we went to Bryce Canyon National Park. Very different from Zion. Zion has steep, straight cliffs, Bryan is famous for its Hoodoos, which are startling, singular tall rock foundations, some of them isolated tall peaks, some great clusters of individual Hoodoos. Again, staggering beauty.

Then, we went to Capitol Reef National Park. Very beautiful, different from the others. A striking wall of petroglyphs carved by Native American tribes centuries ago. What I remember about this stay was a visit to a restaurant where our waitress was a very beautiful, very intelligent Mormon woman of 22. She told us that she waitresses to support herself but she is also a teacher in a private Mormon school. She is unpaid, as it is her contribution to her church. She teaches 6th and 7th grade children. We asked her about her own education, and she said she did not finish eighth grade. We urged her to get a GED. She seemed to think there was a stigma associated with a GED, but we insisted it would enable her to go to community college. She plays many instruments, including a pedal harp, and she wants to do something more with her life. We hope we persuaded her to get a degree.

Next stop, the Arches. A national park noted for great rock arches carved by thousands of years of erosion. No way to describe the arches other than to say you must see it.

We spent a night in Page, Arizona, which is centrally located among all the parks. Instead of touring, we went to the local urgent care facility (federally funded, but not by Trump), where I waited a long time, following a large number of Navaho families. There was only one nurse-practitioner on duty that day. I had been coughing throughout the trip, and I also cut my leg when I grazed it closing the car door a few days earlier. The nurse-practioner examined me and told me I had bronchitis and the cut on my leg was infected. Picked up several prescriptions, and we left the next day for the Grand Canyon.

The height of our Grand Canyon trip was a helicopter ride over the canyon. It is magnificent. What a beautiful country we live in. A great vacation. I recommend it to everyone. It will make you grateful to the foresighted leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, who recognized the importance of preserving our national heritage, and the many other Presidents who fought to assure this great gift to the American people and the people of many countries who travel there as we did, to experience awe.