travel dates: June 15-21, 2017 What I remember most about the planning process for the Yellowstone part of our trip is that I found it completely overwhelming. I’m not sure if you’ve heard the rumors, but it’s true: Yellowstone is BIG. And we had six nights planned there, making it one of the longest stops […]
Jimmy Carter, More Jimmy Carter, and a Canyon: A South Georgia Weekend (also there was beer)
travel dates: November 18-20, 2017 It was the night before we were all going to go to Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school class, and I was fretting. I’d never been in the same room with a real, live president before. What would we say? What were we supposed to do? Would the Secret Service be suspicious […]
Devils Tower National Monument with Kids: A Stormy Night at America’s First National Monument
Travel dates: June 12-13, 2017 The danger of giving yourself only one afternoon/evening to tour Devils Tower, America’s very first National Monument (designated as such by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906) is that a poorly timed thunderstorm can really mess up your plans. We got to the KOA next door to the park fairly early in […]
Wind Cave National Park and the Mammoth Site with Kids: Black Hills South
travel dates: June 11, 2017 Wind Cave National Park Our family had just declared Ranger Reed from Mount Rushmore our favorite Ranger ever, but just a few days later we found ourselves handing off the title to Ranger Earl at Wind Cave National Park. Sorry Ranger Reed. There’s a lot of competition out there in […]
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 […]
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, […]
Two Days in St. Louis with Kids and Bikes: Four Free Things to Do
Our family’s relationship with St. Louis goes all the way back to spring of 2015, when we went there and to Mammoth Cave for spring break. And we had a fabulous time (and didn’t get to see nearly everything), so we decided on St. Louis for our first multi-day stop of our summer trip. We […]
Forts of Charleston: Moultrie and Sumter
Travel dates: April 1-8, 2017 When British warships attacked the partially finished Fort Moultrie in 1776, the story goes, the colonists were able to stave off the attack thanks to the palmetto logs that made up the fort’s walls. The soft walls absorbed the shot, and some cannonballs even bounced off of them. I’ve always […]
A Day on Tybee Island, GA
Travel date: December 29, 2016 I think our Tybee Island day was my favorite from this trip, which has me overanalyzing and trying to figure out why. And I can’t really put my finger on it–some combination of Tybee itself, the stuff we saw there, everyone’s various moods….I wouldn’t be able to replicated the experience […]