Have Yourself a National Geographic Summer

I'm looking forward to seeing my pal Anton Zuiker in the next couple of days, as he makes one of his patented whirlwind visits to Cleveland, managing to find quality time with his many friends and at his favorite places. And I recall that he once said his goal in life was to one day edit National Geographic magazine. Life has taken him to other, equally interesting, summits. But thinking about him caused me to visit the magazine's wonderful website, where I found a couple of especially interesting items. Taken together as a guide, they could easily transform your summer.

This package is a wonderful guided tour to the best of America's easily-overlooked wonders, our national park system. You can thank the formidable Teddy Roosevelt for planting that seed, and thousands of others since for watering and maintaining them. I've yet to spend much time at any of them, but I hope to change that before long. And while you're exercising your body (to return to yesterday's theme of mind-body exercise), you can also nourish the mind with this exquisite list of the 100 best adventure books of all time. As it happens, I didn't find one I had read until all the way down to #26, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. And you can quibble that Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (it's #30) doesn't belong on the list at all, given the substantial questions that have been raised about its authenticity (as I wrote about here), but those are mere quibbles. I plan to keep this list around for the next few years, as a reminder about several books worth reading. That is, at least whenever I'm feeling adventurous.