My wife and I — along with Toby the Puppy — are preparing for a two-week-plus journey out west where we’re going to enjoy the sights associated with two massive federal government projects.

Yes, the federal government has lured us to take in these projects’ splendor and to marvel at the genius that created them.

Our first stop will be the nation’s first national park: Yellowstone. We’ll be parked outside the west gate of Yellowstone in an RV camp in Montana.

The federal government established Yellowstone National Park in 1872. It would the first in a long line of gorgeous exhibits of natural splendor.

And yet we get rumblings from Washington that the government wants to scale back its national park land, specifically its national monuments, which also are run by the National Park Service, an arm of the Department of Interior.

I am of the view that we need to set aside more land for Americans to enjoy, not less of it.

We intend to see Yellowstone again and thank those far-sighted individuals who saw fit to create a national park system that would stand the test of time … and I hope it’s forever!

From there we’ll venture to the Columbia River in eastern Washington, where we’ll take a gander at a project that came into being during the Great Depression.

President Franklin Roosevelt inherited an economy in free fall in 1933. He then set about creating the mother of government economic stimulus packages. It included the Bureau of Reclamation, which began construction on Grand Coulee Dam in July 1933.

This is a product of what I would call “good government.” It’s a quaint saying these days. We don’t hear much about the good that government does on behalf of Americans. Grand Coulee produces electricity and also irrigates some fertile farm land where growers produce food to feed millions of Americans.

How can that ever be a bad thing?

So we’ll cast our gaze on these two governmental masterpieces. They’ll make me even prouder of the things my government has done for all of us.