The Mother of All Sins - (or "To Sticker or Not to Sticker - That is the Question")

This page of stamps is quite lovely, no???

Ah......Eisenhower National Historic Site, absolutely gorgeous.

Antietam Battlefield - Perfection (even though it took us two separate visits to do it right).

Monocacy - Small but charming....

But then - I digress. Look closer, my friends......

Is that????.....No, that couldn't.......Surely they wouldn't......Oh No They Di'int!........

Yes - a sticker it is......and rather poorly cut from the looks of it.

When the Cales began this quest after visiting White Sands National Monument in May of 2009, we realized to our horror that we had visited over 40 additional sites across the country at one time or another during our marriage. The dilemma was set.

Should we bite the bullet and write each location asking (more like begging) for them to send us a copy of their Passport Stamp for inclusion in our own book? Indeed.  So, off we wrote 40+ locations, enclosing a SASE and round stickers hoping for an answer of some sort.

Every.Single.Location.Replied.

We literally RAN to the mailbox each day to see what envelopes awaited us. The fun we had opening each envelope, inspecting each sticker and cutting it to the passport proportions was worth the ridicule we knew we would one day experience from hard-core stampers.

This pursuit, while there are hundreds, if not thousands of others across the nation obsessed like us...is essentially an individual one. The joy of visiting each site, no matter when accomplished, is what makes the memories, not the passport stamp itself, right??

I know....I'm laughing at that crap, too......ARE YOU KIDDING??? The stamp is the proof! The only real proof that someone has walked the fields of Gettysburg or through the grandness of the Lincoln Memorial. A sticker could be gotten by anyone!

We know........we struggle with going to a Stampers Convention (to which, as of yet....we have not) due to the fact that we would have to reveal the "Invasion of the Passport Stickers" horror to a crowd that just might laugh us out of the hall.

But we temper that with the fact that....this IS for us. This is our obsession. We know we have been to each and every stickered location and that pacifies us for now.

Except this sticker........I seriously still have nightmares about this one....