travel dates: October 6-9, 2017 We usually try to take advantage of long weekends to go to places that are out of reach for regular weekend trips. But when we were looking at Columbus Day weekend, we realized that Dave had the Monday off, but Ari (who’s taking dual enrollment classes at a local college […]
Visiting Mount Rushmore with Kids: More Black Hills
Travel dates: June 9-11, 2017 It’s impossible to see Mount Rushmore for the first time. It’s one of the most iconic images in the world, and most of us have had it burned into our brains for as long as we can remember. But if you make the trip to the Black Hills of South […]
Rapid City with Kids: Our Two, Too Short Visits
It’s 98 degrees in Rapid City, South Dakota. Dave and Abe have found a playground with a splash pad downtown and are hanging out there with all the other reasonable humans in the area. My older children, on the other hand, are dragging me all over downtown, begging for just a couple of more photos […]
Exploring Custer State Park with Kids
People like to pay Custer State Park in South Dakota the compliment of saying that it’s so good it could be a National Park. After visiting a million or so National Parks and a fair number of state parks this summer, I’m prepared to concur: Custer State Park can hold its own with many of the 59 […]
Game Lodge Campground at Custer State Park: Campground Review
Travel dates: June 7-12, 2017 The Black Hills is one of those happy locations where the problem isn’t finding a good campground, but narrowing the many great choices down to one. Or two or three if you want to move around the area. We were coming off of a string of one and two night […]
Mountain View Campground Review: More Mountain Time!
Travel dates: September 22-24, 2017 Since we kind of have a theme going on here, how about one more fun in the mountains kind of post before I get back to talking about the summer trip (which will also soon become very mountainous)? As those who pay attention to my whining will recall, our trailer […]
Dahlonega and Amicalola Falls State Park: a Day in the North Georgia Mountains
A terrible thing happened to us a few weeks ago: we had to cancel our planned Labor Day trip to the Smoky Mountains because our trailer was still in the shop. (Now it’s home! We headed out with it this weekend!) Terrible might be an overstatement, but we were disappointed. So we decided to devote one day of […]
Best Interstate Rest Areas for Kids (also, maybe you’ve always been curious about the history of rest areas in general?)
We stopped at a few exceptional rest areas on our trip this summer, and I wanted to share what we found on the blog…but none of them by themselves really seemed to justify an entire post. So I thought maybe I’d group them together into a Best Interstate Rest Areas for Kids round-up kind of […]
The Badlands with Kids: National Park or World’s Best Playground?
At Yellowstone, everything will kill you; you can’t walk 20 yards without reading a sign about how you’re going to be eaten by a bear or gored by a bison or boiled alive in a mudpot. At Grand Teton, you can admire the majestic, snow capped mountains….but you can’t actually get to the top of […]
A Review of Cedar Pass Campground at Badlands National Park
Travel dates: June 5-7, 2017 We passed by a lot of National Park campgrounds this summer because most of them don’t have hookups, and we’re not set up for not having hookups. So when we got a chance to stay at Cedar Pass Campground, inside the actual park in the Badlands, complete with electric hookups, […]