I just finished a sweet memoir, Dear Bob and Sue, about a couple’s journey through the national parks. It’s written by Matt & Karen Smith, a 50ish couple who visited all the 59 national parks in the United States, including the one in American Samoa.

They write about their impressions of each park, letting their personalities come through. They didn’t do much research or background reading.  They only seemed to write about what they learned when they were at a park. Still a fun read.

This is a funny book, no doubt about it. Matt and Karen, the authors, quit their jobs for a year when they (or at least, when he) were fifty.

They planned to visit all the 59 national park protected by the National Park Service. And they did! Some of the visits were really fly-in, fly out – literally in Alaska. They spend a lot of time drinking and looking for meals, but that’s their way of travelling.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is my “home” park, so I immediately went to that write-up. Since they visited all these parks superficially, they had the usual stereotypes of the Southern Appalachians. Matt even expected to hear Dueling Banjos. He also said that he didn’t want to talk to people in the wilderness. You want to talk to everyone in the wilderness.

Epilogue

Hey, writers. I’m now in the prestigious club of those whose reviews has been rejected by Amazon. In this case they gave me a whole bunch of reasons for rejection. The only one I could think of is that I put “personally identifiable content in the review. So read it on my blog and see if you can pick out why they rejected me.

Answer – probably because I said that the Smokies was my home park. Yeah… Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the country. I’m not the only one that goes there often. In fact, I’m going there tomorrow. This rejection is done by a computer program – for sure.

What if this was a publicity stunt by Amazon? It surely got people talking.