This is the second post of a three-week series. I explained how we ended up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for our 2026 spring break in a previous post. Part three will discuss our explorations of the national park. Stay tuned!

As we drove from our cabin down the main stretch in Pigeon Forge, our 14-year-old son said, “This looks like Vegas.”

Mind you, our children have never been to Las Vegas; their only point of reference is movies and pictures we showed them after our trip to Vegas several years ago, but we could see where he was coming from.

If you’ve never been to Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the drive down the main strip can be a bit of a shock to the system. The drive into Sevier County includes a lot of billboards for attractions one will find along the main strip with the Smoky Mountains—usually covered in a gray-blue haze—rising in the distance. As you drive into town along U.S. 441, you will encounter hotels, souvenir shops, mini-golf, local and chain restaurants, and carnival games and rides for the next several miles. There is a small break in the commercial bombardment in the transition to Gatlinburg, but once you get into town, you will encounter much of the same, only this time the gaudiness is masked by the charm of mountain-themed architecture.

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We didn’t make plans for our trip beyond driving to our cabin and eventually making it into the national park. After all, how do you even start to explain the tourism-driven nature of the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg region? Have we found ourselves trapped in gift shops and roadside attractions over our years of national and state park exploring? Sure, but we usually did one ridiculous thing (because how can you pass up the Corn Palace or Wall Drug?) and then moved right along. Did we find ourselves doing as much as possible on our two family vacations to Orlando? Yes. But Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg are an entirely different world. And our family was completely different now as well.

When we were young and broke newlyweds, we weren’t going to do much. The same was true at five and then ten years. The two times we had gone with children, they were young enough that we had the freedom to tell them what they wanted to do. A toddler might complain about being put into a hiking backpack, but they don’t have much of a choice. And what little one isn’t fascinated by fish and mermaids?

But teenagers? Teenagers see everything. Teenagers pay attention to thrills and are attracted to shiny lights. Teenagers want to do.

The week before we left, our son had asked if we could go to Dollywood. He knew nothing about where we were headed, but he had heard it was a place we could go once we were in Pigeon Forge. I told him we would think about it. I wasn’t excited about spending a whole day (and the money) at an amusement park, but it was the only place he had heard about in the Smoky Mountain region, and he loves thrills. It seemed like a reasonable request.

We got a discounted additional night at the cabin and decided to make the trip down to Tennessee on Sunday instead of waiting until Monday. We got to town before sunset and then decided to drive the strip from Pigeon Forge into Gatlinburg, parking at the aquarium so we could get out and stretch our legs. They quickly discovered there were so many things to do and see. Our son was ready to do something immediately, and our daughter wanted to stop in every tourist shop, but it was after nine, and we needed to get back to the cabin and our dogs. Instead, we told them to start making a list of places they wanted to go. Our son wanted the thrills of mountain coasters. Our daughter wanted the curiosities of Ripley’s. I just wanted to spend time in the national park.

We would find a way to do all of those things.

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Vacationing with teenagers is a different experience from vacationing with small children. They want agency, they realize they are making their own memories, and they need sleep. Their bodies want to stay up playing pool or sitting in a hot tub or doing things, and then they crash and sleep in until 10 A.M. That is not conducive to a vacation with four people who combined have a long wish list of activities they want to do. We learned that the hard way when we went to Disney two summers ago, and we had to get them up so we could maximize our time in the parks. It didn’t help that the most affordable cabin we could find that would allow us to have our dogs was 30-45 minutes away from everything we wanted to do in either Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg. But we found a way to make it work.

On our first full day in the region, we managed to get our kids to Pigeon Forge in time for lunch at The Old Mill, one of my favorite places to eat. The homestyle Southern comfort food is delicious, and I couldn’t resist the multiple corn fritters that arrived on our table. The kids loved their chicken and dumplings, and I savored my fried pork chop and mashed potatoes. Then we spent a little bit of time checking out the shops around the restaurant.

By the time we finally parked in Gatlinburg, it was already early afternoon. We looked into a couple of the sky lifts, but decided that if we wanted to fully enjoy that experience, we should probably wait until the next day to do it. Instead, our daughter got her trip to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, where we explored all of the oddities inside the three-story building. It was what she wanted to do most and made her very happy.

Then it was time to get our son the thrills he was looking for by stopping at the Rocky Top Mountain Coaster on our way back to the cabin. There are several mountain coasters throughout the region, each with its own claims to excitement, but this appears to be the longest of the coasters (our ride was about nine minutes) and has four separate climbs and, therefore, fast descents. Our daughter stayed behind and sat at a picnic table while the rest of us climbed into our individual cars and controlled our own speeds down hills and around sharp turns. It was so much more fun than I expected. If the cost wasn’t so high, I would have gladly gone several more times, even though I’ve gotten far more rollercoaster averse in middle age.

The next day, we prioritized getting into Gatlinburg before we had lunch. We stopped at the Gatlinburg Visitor Center to park for free and take the trolley into downtown. We then headed straight to the lift for Gatlinburg SkyPark.

In our five previous trips to the region, we had looked at the handful of skylift options, looked at the price, and decided to continue on to the national park. This time, we decided to take the family on the lift to a high point where we could see the entire town and the surrounding peaks. We settled on Gatlinburg SkyPark, which would take us to a bridge, a restaurant for lunch, and short hiking trails on our way back to the lift to return to Gatlinburg’s main street.

The trip to the top was fun, as Jeff and I each got a kid for both the way up and down. The bridge was incredible and gave us a chance to see the landscape from above. The burgers at the top were good, and the atmosphere gave us space to play while we waited for our food. And the short hike back to the lift got us moving since we weren’t going to get a hike in the park on that day. It was a worthwhile couple of hours.

The next night, after a day of national park exploring (more on that later), Jeff and our son went to the Pigeon Forge Racing Coaster to get one more mountain coaster experience. I enjoyed some rest and relaxation with our daughter back at the cabin. They thoroughly enjoyed one more ride. (And I was honestly a little jealous.)

In addition to far too much time in shops, we capped off our visit to the Smokies with a night at the Pirates Voyage Dinner and Show. Jeff and I had enjoyed the show in Florida long before we had kids, and we thought our teenagers would enjoy an evening of food and entertainment. Dolly’s Stampeed wasn’t really our thing (for a lot of reasons), but pirates? We’re up for those anytime. It was a good way to end our family vacation before getting ready to head home the next day.

Doing the touristy thing in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg adds up, especially when your kids are adult-sized and have minds of their own. There were things we missed, such as doing a wine trail (for me) and more moonshine tasting (for Jeff, although he got quite the fill at Old Forge Distillery right across from the Old Mill), and still, we got plenty of taste-testing in the time we were there. Most importantly, we enjoyed our time there, and memories were made.

But before we could return to Indiana, we had to show them the national park.

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In this first post of a three-week series, I explain how we ended up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for our 2026 spring break. Parts two and three will discuss both the touristy side of the region and the national park. Stay tuned!

We were walking around the grocery store when I finally admitted to my husband Jeff, “It’s times like right now when I really miss living in Texas. I just want to be able to pick up for a few days away during spring break and head to a state park.”

“Well, we could always drive down to Gatlinburg for a quick trip.”

Startled, I looked right at him. “But we agreed we were never going back there. We were done with trips to the Smokies.”

“Yeah, but the kids don’t even remember our last trip. And it’s the easiest place to get to on our short schedule.”

We did have a shortened schedule. My kids and I are lucky enough to be in school districts that give us two full weeks for spring break, but our daughter is in the high school show choir, and for the last two years, the Indiana state finals have been in the middle of our two-week break. Last year, we entirely gave up making plans, despite my growing anxiety about having a high schooler who would be moving out and heading to college sooner than later. This year, I was going to jump at any opportunity to spend extra time away from home with my whole family.

And why had we sworn off going to the Smoky Mountains?

To be clear, it wasn’t because of the national park. I love the national park. It doesn’t have the same rugged beauty as the Rocky Mountains, but it’s still pretty.

It’s just that Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg had been our go-to vacation spot when we didn’t know where else to go for pretty much the first 15 years of our marriage.

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Our first trip to the region was for our honeymoon nearly 25 years ago. We were young, barely employed, and we would be spending six months in a tiny apartment in southwest Michigan while I finished the last general education class I needed to take in order to finally graduate with my degree in education. My in-laws’ wedding gift to us was paying for our honeymoon accommodations in the location of our choice. We just had to pick somewhere that we could afford to visit.

We got married at the end of December, so while I wanted someplace a little warmer than Michigan, I knew I still wanted to be someplace cozy. Beaches would have been nice, but even in December, flights to anywhere consistently warm were out of the question. My father-in-law looked through the book of time-share options and suggested Pigeon Forge. I had been through Tennessee during my teens, and spending time in the somewhat warmer mountains south of us seemed like as good an idea as any. So we booked flights to Nashville, paid for a rental Ford Ranger (I still don’t know how we managed to rent a car at the ripe old age of 22, but they gave it to us), and headed into the mountains.

We loved it. We really did. We spent time driving around the national park. We went to the Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies. We ate at the Old Mill, and I fell in love with their corn fritters. We even took in an evening at the Comedy Barn, taking home a souvenir VHS of our evening there.

When it was time to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, we were looking for a place we could easily drive to from Indianapolis. We rented a cabin in Gatlinburg and spent a long weekend enjoying the mountains and returning to the Old Mill. When our daughter was born, we took a quick long weekend to the region at the end of the summer and stayed in a hotel, enjoying a short and somewhat affordable family mini-vacation before I had to return to work full-time.

By the time we returned for a fourth trip for our tenth wedding anniversary, we decided that it was a great place to visit, but we were pretty much done with the area. We sat through a time-share presentation (the cost of getting free tickets to the Titanic museum) and determined we had bigger dreams for our growing family. We now had two small children, and we wanted to see the world with them. We wanted to camp and explore the outdoors, and there was more to the outdoors than eastern Tennessee.

Then my dad’s extended family decided to do a big family reunion in Gatlinburg, a mere six months after we said we were done. Jeff resisted a return to a region we had just said we were never going back to, but I insisted. This was about family, not the Smoky Mountains. We packed up our two toddlers and enjoyed a few days with extended family and adventuring with just the four of us. We took the kids to the Ripley’s Aquarium and struggled to get their little bodies to the top of Clingman’s Dome, Jeff doing the brunt of the work by carrying one kid in our hiking backpack. Jeff and I rode our bikes through the rain in Cades Cove, and then we tried to hike to Laurel Falls with both kids, before a rainstorm and black bears prevented us from finishing the hike. Instead of a family picture in front of the falls, I have pictures of all four of us, drenched from head to toe.

And then we swore, again, that we were never going back.

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Instead, we have spent the last fourteen years camping and traveling all over the United States, showing our kids places we’ve loved and experiencing new places together. And yet, since returning to Indianapolis, I had frequently thought about returning to the Smokies with our much older children, teenagers who didn’t remember their first trip to Eastern Tennessee.

So with Jeff’s permission, I made camping reservations just north of Gatlinburg. Jeff made Harvest Host reservations at a Kentucky farm with Highland cows. Then he insisted that I call a mobile tech to check our brakes and axles, just in case. The news wasn’t good. The axle that had given us problems on our way back from Columbus last summer was completely shot. It needed to be replaced, and it couldn’t be done for at least two weeks. We would not be able to safely travel to Tennessee and back with the current axle in place.

Normally, this would have sent me into a spiraling panic, but this time, Jeff and I both decided separately that we needed to just go anyway. I knew it was going to be more expensive, and it wouldn’t be the trip I had dreamed of, but we only had two more spring breaks with our whole family. We needed to go.

Did I want to spend the extra money? No. Was I worried that five nights in a cabin would convince our teenagers they no longer wanted to camp with us? Yes. Would the trip come with extra challenges and be easier in some ways at the same time? Yes and yes.

We decided to squeeze the whole family (including our two dogs) into my new hybrid Santa Fe for the trip. We brought minimal food and had to go grocery shopping once we got there. (And then had to figure out what to do with the extra food once we packed up to go home.) I didn’t have the ability to safely walk the dogs very far for breaks at the cabin, but they survived. We didn’t have extra recreation at the campground, but we did have a pool table and hot tub that got regular use. We had to do a lot more driving because we were further from both Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg than we had planned, but because we had the hybrid, we saved money on fuel, even if we weren’t saving on time in the car.

And while we all enjoyed the time in the cabin and the ease of unpacking and then packing up again to leave, the camper was missed. More than once, the kids and I referred to when we got “back to the camper,” only to have to remind each other that we were returning to a cabin we didn’t own. The camper is still our home away from home, for now.

We don’t regret going anyway, even if it wasn’t everything I wanted it to be when we first started planning the trip at the last minute, and that’s ok.

Next week, I’ll share details on what it was like to try avoiding tourist traps with two hyper-aware teenagers.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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A few years ago, I wrote about my desire not to lean into a particular writing niche. I had too much to say, too many interests, and I saw all of those things tangled up together in my writing.

It’s why, after months of digging into faith and political commentary, I suddenly found myself writing about travel during the first part of my summer vacation. I believe travel expands our understanding of the world. I believe it enriches our own lives. And there is no better way to support a local economy than to spend time eating, drinking, and spending money in the community.

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In a nation increasingly divided, I know there is a lot of ire directed toward those of us in “red states.” As a Hoosier and former Texas resident, I have experienced this phenomenon for over a decade. And I know there are people who may think, “The world is going up in flames. Why should we care about the Bourbon Trail? That’s in Kentucky.”1

I would argue that it matters because it is a part of our nation’s history, it plays an important role in our nation’s economy, and experiencing the Bourbon Trail once again highlighted, for me, just how interconnected everything is.

So here are my three important takeaways from our three days exploring Bourbon Country.

The Environment Matters

As with most of our current problems, the environment never should have been turned into a Left vs. Right issue. The health of our planet matters to everyone who lives on it, especially since most of us won’t have the luxury of colonizing another planet if this one burns up. Because the bourbon industry is dependent on agriculture, there is a strong understanding of just how much the health of the planet matters to the entire enterprise. Many bourbon distilleries are prioritizing creation care because they understand that if the environment collapses, their livelihoods will also collapse.2

Then, as I was doing research for each of the places we visited, I discovered these additional fun facts:

• At Woodford Reserve, they are recycling 98% of their waste materials across all operations, have dedicated 10 acres to native grass restoration, and compost 97% of food scraps on the property.

• On Maker’s Mark’s webpage, they announce that they are “committed to shaping the future of bourbon through innovation and investment for the better of people and the planet.” It was the only facility with recycling bins everywhere and there is a solar field powering most of the facility. The new limestone cellar, built to house Maker’s 46, is built into a limestone cliff and has a living roof. And Star Hill Farm has committed to being pesticide and fertilizer free.

• Angel’s Envy has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant trees in urban communities to replace the white oak trees the company uses for their own barrels. Since 2014, they’ve replenished over 311,000 White Oaks and over 40,000 trees across 62 acres in Kentucky.

• Heaven Hill saves water by placing condensers on a cooling tower loop instead of using city water for the cooling process. They are also working with loggers to improve the logging process in a way that maximizes the use of the wood and minimizes the ecological damage.

• At Four Roses, our tour guide told us how the distillery was working to recycle the water they use in their process to minimize the amount of water being pulled.

• Buffalo Trace has experimented with recycling plastic by mixing it with asphalt in the paved areas of its facility and has built its own water treatment plant to create a closed-loop cooling system, minimizing water waste.

• Nearly every distillery bragged about their corn being GMO-free and the recycling of the mash once the distillation process is complete. Kentucky’s cows are fed with the leftover mash from nearly every distillery in the state. And the barrels from each distillery are sent around the world for additional purposes, used by wineries, scotch and tequila distilleries, and sometimes eventually used for furniture craft.

Is each company doing sustainability perfectly? No, but it is clear the industry recognizes the importance of caring for the environment if they want to be able to keep producing high-quality product.

The Economy Matters

I completely understand the sentiment that praised Canada for refusing to buy and distribute Kentucky Straight Bourbon as retaliation for pointless tariffs levied on the country, but economic issues do not just affect individual regions.

First, when local economies suffer, the people are often easily persuaded to vote against their own interests because they will vote for the people who appear to care for them, even if their stated policy positions say otherwise.3 Suffering people are easily manipulated, so yes, even if our particular region of the country is not suffering at a particular time, we should still care about what is happening in the economy of other regions of the country. (I would think that the past decade would make that obvious.)

Second, while many of the Kentucky distilleries try to keep as much of their production local as possible, it cannot all be local. Rye and barley often have to be brought from other regions of the United States, and sometimes from other countries. The White Oak comes from around the United States and the items sold in the gift shops are produced outside of the state as well. We are a global economy. If one sector suffers, multiple sectors will be impacted. And while we could probably find a way to do the global part better, it is hard to deny that the global economy has helped us more than hurt us.

Finally, Kentucky produces 95% of the bourbon consumed worldwide, and one of the biggest consumers is Japan. The bourbon barrels are recycled and used by liquor producers around the world. Bourbon isn’t a local economic story; it’s a global one. Disrupting the bourbon trade doesn’t just hurt Kentucky. A lot of other people are caught up in the trade cycle as well.

Regulation Matters

One of the important historical markers of the Bourbon Trail story is the impact of Prohibition on the industry. A constitutional amendment almost permanently destroyed the industry, but it didn’t stop people from continuing to produce and trade it. Instead, it just led to product that was less safe and trade practices that endangered nearly everyone involved.

Once Prohibition ended, the bourbon industry called for stricter regulations that would make the product safer for consumers and protect distilleries from potential lawsuits for producing dangerous product.

It’s a lesson we would be wise to apply to the current Wild West approach to both gambling and marijuana in the United States. When we can minimize the damage of human vices practiced in moderation, we should. The liquor industry has shown how to do it and has been doing so for a long time. We study the past to better understand the present and create a better future. I believe this is one area where we are seriously lacking in lessons learned.

I loved our trip on the Bourbon Trail and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who enjoys history and wants to support local economies. There are enough craft distilleries and local wineries for a full multi-day trip, and the Kentucky countryside is too pretty to describe. The Trail is a perfect start to stepping out of information silos and getting close with fellow human beings with a shared interest: history and bourbon.

A breakdown of our trip

Support my writing

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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Note: This post is too long for email. To see all of the pictures and read the whole piece, you will have to open it in your browser.

This is Part 3 of our Bourbon Trail travels. To start from the beginning, start here:

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Even though my sister and brother-in-law had to return after two days on the Trail, we decided to stick it out for one more night so we could do Four Roses, since it was closed during the first two planned days of our trip.1 Before we left for Kentucky, we looked at a few other options for our last day and settled on Castle and Key because the facility looked fascinating, but as we completed our tours in Louisville the previous day, my husband, Jeff, decided we probably didn’t need to do that tour anymore. I sent an email with high hopes that they would let us cancel the tour for a full refund, and we made plans to go ahead with our Four Roses tour the next day and play the rest of the day by ear.

Four Roses

Four Roses has been one of my husband’s favorites for years, and it was our first tour when we did the Bourbon Trail eleven years ago. During that trip we visited in July, which meant we were touring when they were on hiatus from production.2 This time, we would be able to see the distilling process and visit their new visitor center.

The Four Roses grounds were just as pretty as I had remembered. Our tour included the full distilling process, and after walking through the main areas during production, I understand why they close the unairconditioned facility during the hottest summer months. It was only June and unseasonably cool for Kentucky, and it was still hot once we were inside, even with windows open everywhere.

Our tour guide was fantastic, full of history and unique information about the company and the distilling process, highlighting once again how many of these distilleries are trying to minimize their environmental impact and give back to their communities. (At Four Roses, they are constantly researching ways to minimize their water use by reusing as much of the water that they pull from the local creek as possible.) As a final treat in the tasting room, we were told we could take our water glasses with us, which meant we came home with two free Four Roses glasses. The tour was worth sticking around for one more day.

Buffalo Trace

Ever since we had arrived in Kentucky, Jeff had been checking the Buffalo Trace website to see what bottles they were putting out in their gift shop every day. You see, Buffalo Trace puts out a certain number of different selections every day. Those items are sold without the typical liquor store markup and are limited to one bottle per customer every 90 days. What did my husband want? Blanton’s, which he could get at half the price that he had seen it in most stores.

For days, I had been trying to figure out how we could get from Four Roses to Buffalo Trace and still make it to our tour at Castle and Key on time. As we left Four Roses, I got the confirmation email that our tour had been cancelled, which meant we could head straight for Buffalo Trace, Jeff could purchase the Blanton’s he had just discovered would be available, and then we could go home.

Buffalo Trace hadn’t been on our original list because we weren’t sure how much would be open after it flooded in April. Also, I didn’t realize just how much my husband wanted to visit the gift shop until we were there. As he wandered the large gift shop, wide-eyed like a kid in a candy shop, I stopped at the visitor desk to find out if there were any tours open. Not only was there a tour available, but it was free. That’s right, a tour with a tasting at the end was free. We jumped on it, only to discover that when we bypassed the front visitor center and walked straight to the gift shop, we hadn’t gotten the required wrist bands necessary for both tours and purchases in the gift shop. (They tie the bands to IDs, which helps them track visitors and ensure that you don’t buy more than your allotted amount of liquor.) Oops! With that mistake corrected, we signed up for the tour, Jeff bought his Blanton’s, and I ran it back to the truck, returning just in time to hear our tour guide Todd start his introduction.

After two days of learning about the distilling process, this time we got a tour that was entirely about the history of Buffalo Trace and the historic grounds that had been producing different whiskeys since before Kentucky became a state. Our tour guide belonged to a family that had been distilling liquor for generations, including an ancestor who had supplied spirits to Al Capone. He was funny, full of stories, and showed us a different side of the bourbon process and the history behind it. We finished off our last tasting with one vodka (it wasn’t bad and I probably would have liked it in some morning orange juice), a handful of whiskeys and bourbons, and one very delicious bourbon ball from Rebecca Ruth Chocolates, which has been providing Buffalo Trace with their bourbon balls since the chocolate treat was invented.3

The tour would have been worth it, even if we had to pay for it, but it was a perfect way to end our time in Kentucky. After the tour, we both felt fulfilled. We returned to our camper and dogs, packed up, and headed north again to Indiana.

For those looking for a short trip that checks off a lot of boxes, the Bourbon Trail does just that. I truly cannot recommend it enough, even if you don’t like bourbon.

Ready to plan your own trip?

I’ve created a Bourbon Trail planning spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Feel free to make a copy and use it for your own planning purposes.

Get planning sheet here

Here is the live video I made after our first day of travels.

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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Note: This post is too long for email. To see all of the pictures and read the whole piece, you will have to open it in your browser.

This is Part 2 of our Bourbon Trail travels. To start from the beginning, start here:

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Because my sister and brother-in-law had to head back to Indianapolis on our second day of distillery tours, we decided to make our way down Whiskey Row in downtown Louisville, which would give them a head start on their way home.

The Bourbon District takes visitors down a one-mile stretch of a revived downtown Louisville. It is block after block of distillery tours, tasting rooms for spirits distilled outside of Louisville, and historic sites. Louisville sits right on the Ohio River, and the introduction of the railroad through Kentucky helped make it the capital of Kentucky’s bourbon empire during the 19th century. By 1900, more than 100 whiskey-related businesses resided along a 10-block stretch of Main Street, making it the biggest concentration of whiskey companies in the world.

With only a handful of Kentucky distilleries remaining in business during Prohibition, Whiskey Row dried up.1 Fifteen years ago, as the popularity of bourbon and whiskey again surged, various companies started buying up dilapidated buildings in downtown Louisville and the rebirth of the city’s downtown began.

We picked three places to tour during our visit.

Michter’s Distillery

Jeff had never had Michter’s and neither had our brother-in-law, but they had heard good things and wanted a reason to try it. That was enough for me to reserve it as our first tour of the day.

The majority of Michter’s production takes place at their Shively location, away from the downtown Fort Nelson location, but we still got to see the full distilling process in the back-half of the historic building. Unlike every other distillery we visited, Michter’s puts their bourbon in the barrel at 103 proof instead of 120 or 125. This means they choose to water down the liquor at the beginning of the aging process instead of the end.

I’m no bourbon expert. As I’ve said, I don’t love bourbon and I’m not going to choose it for a drink, probably ever. However, I believe that process pays off because it was the only tasting experience where I didn’t make a face with each sip on my tray. It was smooth and didn’t burn and I’m going to attribute that to the way it enters the barrel. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

Also, my sister and I both appreciated the vanilla jelly bean we all were given to eat at the beginning of the tasting. It was a definite bonus.

Angel’s Envy

After lunch at Against the Grain, connected to Slugger Field, we headed across the street for our tour of Angel’s Envy.

In 2016, Angel’s Envy became the first distillery since Prohibition to open up for full production along Whiskey Row. The facility is stunning, and while the process isn’t much different from the other distilleries we visited, the compact production is impressive.

And for those who don’t like bourbon, this tasting was accompanied by three different chocolates to enhance the taste of each of the bourbons we tried. It was a nice bonus.

Evan Williams Experience

Evan Williams is part of the Heaven Hill family, so we had already been to the main location, but the Experience in downtown Louisville includes historical background on Evan Williams (Kentucky’s first licensed distiller), the history of bourbon in Louisville, and a short explanation of the distilling process. The downtown location has several different options for experiences, including a speakeasy tasting experience that sounded like a lot of fun, but we only had time for the basic package. It was a good final stop before we headed back to the campground, and we learned more about bourbon along the river than we had at the other distilleries, so that was a bonus.

Talon Winery

I had been a good sport for two days, so Jeff decided we could stop at Talon Winery, a local winery in Shelbyville before we settled in for the night. It was close to the campground and literally on our way “home.” I enjoyed six wines and some time sitting on their deck out back. The Kentucky winery scene is exploding to keep up with the bourbon, which we learned on our stop at Chicken Cock the day before. Seriously, if you are making time to do the bourbon trail, take an hour or two to also check out the local wineries for the non-bourbon drinkers in your group.

It was a good day. A long day, but a good day. We needed a little time to relax and pack up before we made our final tour push the next morning. And now I’ll leave you, dear readers, with two other fun pictures I took while we walked around Louisville.

Ready to plan your own trip?

I’ve created a Bourbon Trail planning spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Feel free to make a copy and use it for your own planning purposes.

Get planning sheet here

Here is the live video I made after our first day of travels.

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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Store Link

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Note: This post is too long for email. To see all of the pictures and read the whole piece, you will have to open it in your browser.

“Wait, are all of your kids going to be at camp at the same time?”

“Yeah, we lucked out. And it made planning the rest of summer so much easier.”

My son was going to be at camp the same week as all of his Indianapolis cousins. My daughter was going to be traveling to New York that same week with her high school choir.1

And suddenly my sister and her husband and my husband and I had a precious small window to finally do what we had been talking about doing for years: the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

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My husband Jeff and I first did the Bourbon Trail eleven years ago. We were looking for a quick trip without kids, we had just upgraded to a full travel trailer, and he had an itch to head down to Kentucky from Fort Wayne, Indiana to explore the distilleries. I don’t like bourbon. I’ve never liked bourbon. But he had given me the gift of Gettysburg the summer before, so I gladly complied. Besides, I loved Kentucky and was looking forward to a few days without our little ones before getting ready to head back to school for another long school year.

During our short trip, I learned I still didn’t love the bourbon, but I did love the fascinating history behind the uniquely American craft of making straight bourbon. I learned a lot during our two days driving around Bourbon Country. In the years since, we’ve talked with friends and family about how much fun we had. My sisters and I had joked that we should do a big couples trip so our husbands could all enjoy the bourbon and we could enjoy time together. When we moved back to Indianapolis and very close to one sister, it suddenly seemed like a possibility.

And now, with my two kids and her four kids occupied for the week, we would finally get a chance to explore a few hours south, without begging our parents to watch the kids.

The Common Factors

Here’s what you need to know before learning about specific places along the Bourbon Trail. Each distillery has it’s own unique recipe, process, and barrel specifications. Each distillery has also experimented with other liquors that do not count as bourbon.2 To get that label, it must be

1. Aged in a new charred oak barrel

2. Contain at least 51% corn

3. Be distilled to a maximum of 160 proof, enter the barrel at no more than 125 proof, and enter the bottle at no less than 80 proof

4. Be aged at least two years (although this is incredibly rare because most want it to age more than four years)

5. Have no color or flavor additives

What makes Kentucky Straight Bourbon unique? First, it must age in the state of Kentucky for at least one year. Second, the limestone shelf which creates the unique Kentucky cave system also filters the water to the point of near purity. The streams, rivers, and aquifers in northern Kentucky provide the perfect water source for distilling bourbon.

You will hear this at nearly every single distillery you visit along the way. However, visiting each one gives you a taste of what makes each one unique.

Woodford Reserve

Even though Jeff and I had been there before, Woodford Reserve was one of the “must-sees” for both of the boys. I wasn’t going to complain. The historic buildings are beautiful and I remembered a particularly tasty bourbon ball during our first visit. It didn’t take me much convincing to make the tour reservations.

The distillery has been in operation since 1812, making it a National Historic Landmark. While there is a fairly new visitor welcome center (it wasn’t there the first time we visited) and a newer gift shop and tasting room, the production buildings and onsite rickhouses have been around for a long time. In fact, the rickhouse we got to visit is the oldest limestone rickhouse in the United States still being used for its original purpose.

We witnessed mash fermenting in wooden barrels, the triple copper stills turning the fermented beer into clear liquid, and the line-up of barrels waiting to be pushed down the line for placement in a warehouse. We inhaled the scent of nearly two hundred years of angel share that had evaporated into the rickhouse and then rode up to the gift shop and tasting room where five different varieties awaited us.

I love angel share, the water and liquor that evaporate from the barrels after years of expanding and contracting into the wood of the charred barrels. I do not love the final product. I sipped each one and passed them along to my willing husband before I savored the dark chocolate covered bourbon ball. Jeff selected a bourbon, I selected bourbon caramels, and we were all ready to head to the next stop.

Maker’s Mark

I’ve always loved Maker’s Mark. I fell in love with the beautiful historic grounds when we visited on our first Bourbon Trail trip. That love was renewed when we returned during our disastrous 2021 summer vacation, so that Jeff could get his Ambassador tour and bottle. Maker’s Mark was the first “grown up” liquor that Jeff ever really appreciated. For those reasons and more, it was a must-see on our tour.

We took the beautiful trail to the visitor center, stumbling upon the resident cat as we hurried to our tour location.

For the next hour, our incredibly knowledgeable tour guide gave us a complete lesson in the chemical processes happening during the fermentation process as we stood next to the wooden fermentation vats. He told us the history of the individually cut labels that are still cut with the same 1930’s machine purchased by the founder’s wife so she wouldn’t have to change the label design when she could no longer hand cut them. (Seriously, Margie Samuels was a genius. Not only did she graduate from the University of Louisville with a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry in 1933, but she was also behind most of the marketing techniques that still make Marker's Mark unique today.)3 And he explained why all of the buildings on the grounds are black: Margie hated the black fungus that is a natural biproduct of the fermentation process and decided to disguise it with the now signature painted black buildings.

We toured the on-site rickhouse and the Limestone Cellar, where they store Maker’s 46 and create their select versions of the bourbon. We tasted a full flight of bourbon (my sister and I again passed our tasted bourbons on to our husbands) and walked under the Chihuly glass sculptured ceiling on our way to the gift shop. I can still say it is one of my favorite tours because of the beauty of the grounds, the company’s focus on sustainability, and the long history of the place.

Chicken Cock

The last planned stop for the day is proof that grown men still have a part of middle school in them.

While there is no distilling tour for this recently resurrected bourbon company, Chicken Cock has a long history of name recognition with a name that precedes the use of the English word “rooster.” The boys enjoyed their tasting of two different whiskies, many jokes were made, and then we headed out of Bardstown, a cute little town where I could have spent the next couple of hours exploring if we had been there earlier.

Heaven Hill

Heaven Hill was not a planned stop, but we were driving right past it and the gift shop and museum were still open and free. We had stopped there on our original trip eleven years ago, but because of a massive fire in 1996, it was still rebuilding most of its operation. There are still limited options at the distillery visitor center, but the museum is very impressive with a lot of history about the company and bourbon, in general. The cost of the tasting itself is fairly reasonable, but there are also a lot of other experiences offered at the center that could have been fun to try. However, it was the end of the day and we were ready to head back to the campground and make some dinner, so we headed back out on the Kentucky country roads.

That was it for our first day on the Trail. We needed to get some sleep so we would be ready to head into Louisville for a day on Bourbon Row.

Ready to plan your own trip?

I’ve created a Bourbon Trail planning spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Feel free to make a copy and use it for your own planning purposes.

Get planning sheet here

Here is the live video I made after our first day of travels.

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

But if you want to know more about Maker’s Mark, here is the blog post from our trip there four years ago.

If you want to get my posts from directly on the Bourbon Trail, don’t forget to subscribe!

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During the early years of my marriage, summer vacations were out of the question. My husband worked a job without PTO and my private school teaching job kept me working long after the students left the building. One summer, I twisted my young husband’s arm to convince him to take a week-long trip out to Nebraska for my extended family reunion for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Planning the trip strained our marriage, while the actual trip put additional pressure on our already meager bank account.

During our childless years, our summers were spent taking occasional weekend trips up to Michigan to visit our parents and the lake or camping at some of our favorite state parks. One year, we combined a conference in DC (for me) with a couple of days exploring the nation’s capital and Philadelphia. But our vacation time was still limited to what we could do with the least amount of money.

Then kids brought different summer challenges.

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When our daughter was a baby, we took a long weekend trip to the Smoky Mountains because we wanted family time before I returned to work. The next summer, we were moving two hours north, and our entire summer was consumed by too many changes to count. The following summer, we had another baby, and a year later, I was just starting to see the end of the graduate school tunnel.

Real family vacations were out of the question.

When our kids were four and two, my husband convinced me that we should buy a camper. I didn’t want to buy a camper. We didn’t have the money, and I just couldn’t think about the work it would take to get our family of four out to local state parks for weekend trips.

That summer, we took a trip without the kids to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, taking our new-to-us hybrid camper for her maiden voyage. We then spent nearly every weekend we could for the remainder of the summer exploring Indiana state parks. We potty-trained our two-year-old son by having him pee whenever he felt like it in the woods. We visited playgrounds and took short hikes. The kids rode their bikes as far as they could, our son picking up rocks and pine cones to place in his tricycle’s back basket.

The next summer, we upgraded and continued our weekend explorations. We didn’t have time, money, or energy for full vacations, but we could embrace weekend escapes as a family. We dreamed of “someday” trips, places we wanted to visit with our camper in tow.

When we moved to Texas in 2015, my husband started working from home, the kids were more capable of helping us prepare for camping trips, and we had more disposable income. Summer vacations became the rule instead of the exception. Week-long trips during Christmas break and shorter Campsgiving and spring break trips also got added into the mix.

Over the past two years, we have gone all out with our vacations. Two summers ago, we went to Disney, fulfilling a promise I had foolishly made years earlier that we would return before our daughter started high school so we could see all things Star Wars. Last summer, we finally fulfilled our 20-year-old dream to take our kids to Yellowstone and were rewarded by being told by our two teenagers that it was the best vacation they had ever had.

Summer vacations have become both tradition and habit, which is one of the many reasons I’ve been struggling with the approach of a summer without a vacation plan.

The world feels a little more uncertain, the finances a little more tenuous, and parenting teenagers who have goals and needs makes planning all the more difficult. I wanted to take our kids to the Upper Peninsula. I wanted to explore northern Michigan with them and take my own first trip across the Mackinac Bridge. I wanted to soak up as much time with them as possible before our oldest leaves us in two years.

But I hesitated, and that hesitation turned to inaction.

Instead, we made smaller and shorter plans. We are returning to our camping roots from twelve years ago. We’ve reserved weekend trips and made plans for a short trip with my sister and brother-in-law to explore the Bourbon Trail while all of our kids are at camp or on school trips.1

Despite the fact that the kids and I still had to return to school for a few days after Memorial Day, we launched our summer of mini-trips with a weekend in Turkey Run, one of our favorite Indiana state parks. Because my husband used his camp scanner app to find our site, we ended up with two open spots and offered one of the spots to our daughter’s best friend and her parents, which gave us additional social time and kept her engaged.

We completed the Five-Mile Challenge. We had campfires and s’mores. We played a terrible game of washers. We enjoyed much-needed quality time with children who are growing up too fast and making plans for the future, plans that don’t include their parents.

I wrote in the epilogue to my most recent memoir:

As the kids get older, it’s getting harder and harder to convince them to commit to time with just their dad and me. And yes, cell phones and the television get more use these days. But our core value is always making sure we spend as much time outside and as much time together as possible.

Our Memorial Day weekend 2025 exemplified this. To be honest, we all struggled with our phones not working in the state park’s dead zone. The kids lost contact with their friends for a couple of days, and I just wanted to see the rest of the messages my sisters and parents had been sending back and forth. After a long day of hiking over six miles, we took some time to watch the start of the Indy 500 with our television antenna. And we were keeping tabs on the Pacers game as we wrapped up our final evening around a roaring campfire.

But I also watched our teenage children and one friend frolic through the rocks, creek beds, and ravines without a care in the world. Our daughter referred to our second day’s hike as whimsical, which made me smile. By the end of the weekend, I had slowly accepted that this summer was going to look different, but that didn’t mean we were missing out on exploring or precious hours together.

And I finally accepted that as a parent, that is what I need to focus on the most in this season of our lives.

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For more about last year’s camping trip to Turkey Run, read the following post. And yes, beautiful places like this really do exist in Indiana.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I have spent the last six months delivering two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels. This is the final installment.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

Despite my careful planning (mistakes and all) for our family vacation to Yellowstone, I was clueless how to plan for our trip home. By the time we would finish our time in the national park, I knew we would be ready to be home. We would have visited five national parks, four states, and multiple stops along the way. We would be tired but satisfied.

We would also be 1500 miles from home.

My husband Jeff has slowly extended the number of miles he is willing to drive in a day while towing our travel trailer, but I still try to keep it under 400 miles when planning our routes. By that calculation, we would still need four full days to travel home.

During our last two nights in Yellowstone, Jeff and I looked at mileage and camping options across the desolate plains of Wyoming and Nebraska. He finally decided he wanted to make the four-day trip a three-day trip and we calculated new distances.

We left Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone National Park by 9 AM, sad to leave the national park but also ready to head home. We came out of the mountains and traveled through the canyons and past the rivers and reservoirs of the Wind River Reservation. As we traveled through the “blink and you’ll miss it” small town of Shoshoni, I pointed west to tell my two teenagers that I spent my sixth-grade year attending school in the town, and 25 miles past that, I lived in Riverton. It was too long of a detour to take them through the town I had lived in for five years, so instead we continued east, past Casper and then Douglass where we had initially planned to make our first stop.

That night we found ourselves parked in an RV park just outside of Wheatland, Wyoming. Jeff and I headed into town to get the last few food items we would need to get us home. When we returned to our campsite, I watched the clouds and lightning storm grow off in the distance as I walked the dogs. We remained dry, but I pulled my kids outside to see the constant streaks lighting up the entire horizon before we settled in for the night. I wanted them to see a least a little bit of the western storms I had experienced as a child.

We spent the day before we left Yellowstone looking at several Harvest Host options for our drive home, and found the best option closest to our route in York, Nebraska. The Diamond B Horse Motel took us to the countryside, far enough off of the interstate to be quiet for the night and close enough for an easy fuel refill. We joined travelers with horses who needed a place to stay for the night and other RV travelers looking for a simple stop on the way to somewhere else. Our daughter got to play with the host’s cat and we enjoyed looking at the horses grazing in the pens. As an added bonus, the host even gave us access to electricity, so we could run our air conditioning without running out of fuel in our generator. It was everything we could have asked for in a final night on the road.

And then we came home.

There was a lot to reflect on once we returned home, and those posts are for a different time. We returned to Indiana from our Yellowstone adventure tired but fulfilled. And I was already starting to plan our next adventure.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year and into January.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our third day in Yellowstone here.

When we reached our last day in Yellowstone, we were tired and we had already done so much. But Jeff and I still had desires and it required some compromise.

I had always wanted to make a trip to Grand Tetons National Park a part of our vacation. When I first started mapping out our trip a year before, I included a few days in Jackson, Wyoming so we could spend at least one day exploring the national park. As we got closer to nailing down dates, it became painfully clear to me that I couldn’t justify the extra miles and time.

But our campsite in Yellowstone was just over an hour from the entrance to Grand Teton National Park. We were about an hour and a half from the Colter Bay Visitor Center. And the kids and I wanted it to be the last national park of our vacation.

So I offered to drive our family (Jeff had done almost all of the driving by this point) to Colter Bay, where we stopped for pictures, stamps in our passport books, and lunch at Cafe Court Pizzeria, fulfilling all of our desires for a good restaurant meal. It was a short trip, but it fulfilled my desire to say I had done something in a national park I had driven through twice without really stopping. (One of the highways exiting Yellowstone goes straight through the Grand Tetons, so if you are going through Jackson, Wyoming after leaving Yellowstone, you are going to see them. Seriously, if you are taking that route, just stop. It’s worth it.)

Then it was Jeff’s turn to get his wish.

Jeff wants a boat. He’s been talking about his desire for a boat for years. But we have a camper we love and are still paying off, so I keep putting off his boat desires.

But he wasn’t passing up the chance to rent a boat and drive out on Yellowstone Lake.

As he piloted the boat out of the inlet, we sailed past an elk that had stopped traffic on the bridge as we drove to the marina.

Then we spent the next 45 minutes sailing around the large bay, the cold wind off the lake cooling us as the hot sun baked our skin. While Jeff reveled in picking up speed and slowing down to take in the views of snow-capped mountains in the distance, the rest of us enjoyed the relaxing family time.

There is so much to do in Yellowstone and there are other activities we could have prioritized. After all, Jeff never got back out to take a longer bike ride on one of the many possible trails and I didn’t get to take a longer hike off of the main drag (which made our bear spray rental pointless), but our two teenagers still said it was the best vacation we had ever taken. We were going to take that as a win as we prepared for the long haul home.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year and into January.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our second day in Yellowstone here.

On our third day in Yellowstone, we made a careful list of the last “must-dos” for individual family members. While we hadn’t taken any intentional hikes, we still had done a lot of walking on the trails around the park. I still wanted to go on one of the many hikes in Yellowstone, but the cool temperatures that welcomed us to the park had been heating up every day. The rest of my family wasn’t so keen on a long hike into the wilderness, even though we had rented bear spray for that very purpose.

Our son wanted to stop at Canyon Village one more time because he wanted to buy a souvenir knife and he liked one he had seen there. When we arrived, the visitor center was finally reopened, so we checked out the fantastic displays showing the geologic history of the park and the science behind all of the volcanic activity we had experienced for the past two and a half days. We also kept a close eye on the geyser eruption times because Jeff wanted to end his day watching more geysers.

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We traveled to the Norris Geyser Basin, finding a parking spot along the road to join the hundreds of visitors who were also making their mid-day stop at the basin. (There is a parking lot, but it is small and fills up quickly.) During our stop at the gift shop, we discovered the Yellowstone Forever membership which helps to support the park and gives visitors a discount. With several more purchases to make before we headed home, we bought the memberships, kicking ourselves for not having gotten it earlier. (In our defense, the older gentleman cashier was the first to offer it to us. If you ever go to the region, make sure to check on the membership before you buy anything.)

Then we hiked the Porcelain Basin, the shorter of the trails in Norris. The 1.6-mile loop took us past more blue and turquoise springs as well as some springs that have dried up as the geysers have moved.

Then we walked down the trail to the Back Basin. We had no intention of doing the full trail, but we wanted to check out Steamboat Geyser and made a stop at Emerald Spring along the way. Steamboat Geyser was throwing up so much steam we thought we would get lucky enough to see a major eruption, which can throw water as high as 300 feet in the air, but we just got to witness a lot of steam and some bubbling. When we were in the park, the most recent eruption had been May 30. We missed the next eruption by nearly a week.

Despite our desire to do as much as possible, we skipped the Artists Paintpots. The trail was only a mile, but we still needed to make it back to the Upper Geyser Basin to catch another eruption.

Instead, we continued down the loop, stopping at Gibbon Falls and then taking the one-way Firehole Canyon Drive off the main road. We discovered fellow park visitors fishing and swimming in the Firehole River, convincing us to pull over the side of the road and take off our own shoes to step into the rocky river. The water was perfect: clear, cool but not cold, and refreshing under the hot sun. My only regret was we didn’t know to have our bathing suits along.

Before exiting the drive, we stopped to take pictures of Firehole Falls, a picturesque bookend to a surprise drive we had not put onto our itinerary.

It had been a good day, but as evening approached we were tired, hungry, and we still wanted to see Grand Geyser. According to the app, we were in the eruption window, but by the time we arrived, it was over. All we witnessed was the last spitting gasps of the most recent eruption. Instead, we got to witness Castle Geyser in all its glory.

It was time to go home. We were hungry and fighting over where we should eat. We were about an hour from home and the dogs still needed to be let out. With a handful of snacks, we got home and I made as quick of a dinner as possible.

Now I just had to convince Jeff to take a short road trip south to the Grand Tetons.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Order links

Order links

While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year and into January.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our first day in Yellowstone here.

We had two goals for our second full day in Yellowstone: Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic.

And so day two was dedicated to chasing geysers.

After the pace of the previous day, we were ready to do a little less and enjoy the moments as they came to us. We paid close attention to the National Parks app and kept looking at the geyser timings to determine when we needed to be at Old Faithful so we could see at least one eruption. But Jeff wasn’t going to be happy with just one geyser. He had been paying close attention to the timing of multiple “predictable” geysers and he wanted to see as many as possible. He would spend the next two days hoping to see more.

While we had all agreed we were going to take it a little easier on our second day, I was still chasing some waterfalls, and persuaded the family to stop and take pictures of Kepler Cascades before we continued down the road.

When we arrived at the Old Faithful complex, we had just enough time to walk through the Old Faithful Inn, probably one of the only hotels in the world I desperately want to stay in someday. Our kids weren’t nearly as impressed as I hoped they would be, but I still fell back in love with the several-story high great room and fireplace.

Then we sat out in the sunshine to wait for Old Faithful to begin its eruption. While there are bigger geysers throughout the park, this one has earned its name because of its relative predictability and frequency. We listened to the park ranger speak about the science behind Yellowstone’s geysers as we waited for it to finally give us a show.

But we weren’t done in the Old Faithful region. The grounds are the base for the Upper Geyser Basin. After a quick picnic lunch, we hopped on our bikes and rode them down the paved trail past many more geysers and springs. We missed the eruption of Grand Geyser because it was going off while we were waiting for Old Faithful, but we still got to see plenty of hot spots as we rode from stop to stop, getting to each location much faster than if we had decided to go solely on foot. We still had to walk the trails to see several of the geysers and springs, but the bikes helped cut down on time. (There are a handful good and relatively easy places to bike in Yellowstone. I highly recommend taking them if you know you will be able to use them for quick sightseeing transportation. This map shows the geyser locations near Old Faithful.)

Our next stop was Biscuit Basin, where we walked on wooden boards across thermal springs that would kill us if we took a wrong step. The colors left behind by thermal deposits in the active springs and geysers were stunning.

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A couple of weeks after we returned from Yellowstone, the boardwalk we had carefully traversed became damaged when one of the geysers exploded, showering visitors with rock, mud, and thermal water. While we were in the park, we repeatedly told our kids the park was constantly changing. When we showed them pictures of the explosion, we were able to show them we were right. They could return next year and that hike could be totally different.

Next, we needed to fulfill our son’s wish: the Grand Prismatic.

We parked at the Fairy Falls Trailhead parking lot and once again got out our bikes for the one-mile trek to the base of the 0.6-mile trail to the overlook. The views at the top were stunning. The Grand Prismatic is one of the more famous landmarks in Yellowstone, yet for some reason, Jeff and I did not make it a stop when we visited the park 20 years before. It was one of many regrets we had as we drove our kids around Yellowstone.

Then we headed another mile down the road to park alongside the road so we could hike around the gigantic spring. It is a completely different experience to see the Grand Prismatic up close, but still worth it.

This time, we got home to make dinner with plenty of daylight to spare. We had seen some of the most significant landmarks in the park but had not overdone it. I was able to walk the dogs and get them inside before I could be concerned about bears coming out for nighttime snacks. And we were ready to rest for another full day of exploring.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our Wyoming stops before Yellowstone here.

Our family left Cody, Wyoming and our two hours at the Buffalo Bill Center and headed west, across the desert, past the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, and back up into the mountains guarding the entrance to Yellowstone National Park. When Jeff and I had traveled to Yellowstone twenty years before, we had reached the entrance with the sun still high enough in the sky we could see the park, but by the time we reached our campsite in West Yellowstone on the opposite side of the park, we were pitching our tent in the dark.

This time, we were staying at Fishing Bridge Campground, the first major stop inside the park and the only place for large RVs. And because we were arriving before mid-afternoon, we still had enough time to explore the closest locations to the campground before dinner.

After setting up in our roomy pull-through site, we packed up the truck and headed across the street to the Fishing Bridge Museum and Visitor Center.

Yellowstone Lake was everything I had remembered from my two trips to the national park. The water was clear and cold as it lapped on the shore, and the mountains across the lake still held the hint of snow, even in July.

We traveled along the lake shoreline to the West Thumb Geyser Basin. Since the 21-mile drive took us nearly 40 minutes, we knew it would be our last adventure for our first day in the park, but I was eager to show the kids mud pots and hot springs next to the cold Yellowstone Lake they had dipped their toes into nearly an hour before. We walked on the boardwalk trail above the fragile crust and deadly thermal surface. While our daughter didn’t love the smell of rising sulfur, both kids were awed by the boiling ground beneath them and the colorful deposits around each of the springs.

The next morning we had decisions to make. The road around Mammoth Hot Springs was going to be closed for the remainder of the week, so if we wanted to go, we had to spend our first day there. The problem with making Mammoth Hot Springs our ultimate destination was the reality that it was on the other side of the park, and depending on which route we took, it was nearly a 60-mile drive to get there. Because of the size of Yellowstone and natural habitat, there is no quick route to any of the major attractions. One just has to get on the road and go. I argued we should take the shorter route and head toward Tower-Roosevelt. Jeff argued we should take the other route through Norris. Either way we were going to be driving past tourist spots we wanted to see, but the route I wanted to take would take us past more.

I “won” the argument, and we ended up doing nearly half of the park in a single day. Oops!

Our first stop was Mud Volcano, a trail of various mud pots and hot springs. While our daughter once again struggled with the occasional sulfur cloud, our son couldn’t get enough of the boiling mud rising to the surface.

As we continued our drive north, we ran into one of the many infamous Yellowstone traffic jams, only this one was worth the stop. We experienced a rare daytime black wolf sighting off of the road. Since Jeff had a better zoom camera on his phone, he was able to snap a picture of the four-footed beauty, which we originally thought might be a black bear.

Then, our son and I started chasing waterfalls.

The Lower and Upper Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone are on the way to Canyon Village. We took the South Rim Drive to the Lower Falls overlook, stopping for a peek at the Upper Falls along the way. Then we headed toward the North Rim Drive to Canyon Village, where we stopped for a picnic lunch in our tailgate before continuing to chase waterfall views.

There were plenty of ways to see both the Upper and Lower Falls along the North Rim Drive, but we chose to make our primary stop the hike to the brink, which would take us to the top of the Lower Falls. It is a 0.4-mile trail (and 600-foot drop) to stunning views, but after the long, steep hike, we were ready to just continue on to Canyon Village.

Unfortunately, there had been a shooting at Canyon Village only a few days before, so the visitor center was closed during the investigation, but we were still able to take a break at the gift shops and look around before we continued on our drive north and west.

Before we arrived at Tower-Roosevelt, we witnessed our second rare animal sighting on the side of the road, joining several other tourists in taking pictures of the black bear ambling in the sagebrush.

We stopped at Tower Fall, then drove around the grounds at Tower-Roosevelt, but we were now in a race against the clock. We enjoyed the beauty of Yellowstone, driving past hills and rivers as we climbed once again to the Mammoth Hot Springs region of the park.

My family stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel when I was a kid, and while I don’t remember much about the whole park, I do remember the hotel. And Jeff and I had enjoyed our hike around the hot springs when we visited in our 20s. We had been hoping to make it to the visitor center before it closed so we could tour the Fort Yellowstone historical buildings (the US Army administered the park until the early 1900s), but all of our other siteseeing for the day slowed us down. Instead, we would have to just enjoy some ice cream at the hotel complex and then a hike around the ever changing hot springs. We ended our day of siteseeing with a drive around the Upper Terrace Area, the whole reason we had made this our first day final destination.

While I wouldn’t recommend doing everything we did in a single day in Yellowstone, it was a really good vacation day. Our kids saw every type of landmark there is to see in the national park and we got to relive early marriage memories. Most importantly, our kids started falling in love with one of our favorite national parks, just like we hoped they would.

It was time to fix a late dinner and crash into bed so we could do it all over again.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

When I started planning our summer vacation to Yellowstone, one of my South Dakota goals was to camp at Custer State Park. Unfortunately, I put off making those reservations until about four months before we were set to leave on vacation. Since reservations for Custer State Park open nearly a year in advance, we had long missed our window for reservations. It was the first big mistake of my summer vacation planning.

I scrambled to find a place that was both affordable and available. At the time, my sister-in-law was still planning to join us, so I tried to find a place that would fit her as well. We wanted to be close to all of the major sites, and I wanted to be as close to the state park as possible.

Eventually I found a relatively new private campground right on the outskirts of Custer, South Dakota. It had good reviews and the pictures looked nice enough. Plus, it was over half the cost of trying to squeeze into one of the local KOAs. I made reservations and added it to the trip itinerary.

The day we left for the Black Hills, we were all already a little bit ornery. There were advantages to staying in Wall, South Dakota, but as we drove around Badlands National Park, we also discovered a few other places we could have stayed that would have kept us closer to the park itself. It also didn’t help that our campground in Wall had a ridiculous amount of mosquitoes. Every time we went outside our camper and walked around the grounds, we were afraid the little bloodsuckers were going to carry us off. In fact, I gave up my shower on our last night there in hopes we would be able to take a nice hot shower when we got to the Black Hills.

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Then our teenagers woke up in a mood the morning we were supposed to get on the road. Then Jeff took a wrong turn when we were supposed to head south. By the time we got to the campground, we were all on edge with each other and ansty after several days of travel.

Then when we got to our campsite, we discovered my mistake. My very big mistake.

The campground had full hook-up, but no working bathrooms. The sites were small and very close to neighbors. The sewage dump went uphill from our camper, which meant if I wanted a hot shower, dumping the water was going to be a chore.

We enjoyed our tours through Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore. We were thankful we still made it to Jewel Cave. And Custer State Park took our breaths away.

But it was also a two-day stop full of big feelings and the need for another reset. Jeff and I decided that since we had done everything we wanted to do in the Black Hills (besides a visit to Wind Cave), we were going to cut our trip there a day short. We drove to Devil’s Tower a day early, enjoyed the fireworks there, and then headed west to break our trip to Yellowstone into two shorter days of driving instead of one.

It would be worth it.

The drive across northern Wyoming was gorgeous, everything I had remembered after years of traveling all over the state when I was a teenager in youth group. But as we drove past Sheridan and started our way through the Bighorn Mountains, we passed a warning sign at Burgess Junction.

We had to decide if we were going to take the route that was slightly out of our way to Powell but also with less severe grades, or if we were going to take the straighter but more dangerous route. We ignored the GPS and took the Highway 14 route, heading north again once we got out of the mountains and to the Greybull junction. While the drive was gorgeous, Jeff and I both felt our blood pressure rise as the truck and trailer climbed up the mountains and wove through the canyon. We breathed a sigh of relief when we were able to head north in the relatively flat desert land leading to Powell, Wyoming, where we were staying for the night.

We made it to the Powell Golf Club before dinner, giving us plenty of time to park and head into town. The whole family did laundry, as we taught our teenagers how to use the coin-operated machines for their own laundry.1 Jeff and I laughed as they then sat on their phones and waited for the machines to finish doing their thing before we could finally enjoy dinner at Taco John’s and a quick stop at the grocery store.2

I faced some disappointment the following morning when I accepted the fact that we weren’t going to be able to make a stop at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, just outside of Powell. The small parking lot wouldn’t fit our truck and trailer, the center didn’t open until 10, and we needed to get on our way to Yellowstone. Instead, we stopped in Cody and decided to spend some time exploring the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

I remember visiting the Buffalo Bill Museum as a child. We were traveling to Yellowstone with my maternal grandparents and both my mom and grandmother wanted to stop. I knew it would be an interesting place to introduce my teenagers to the American West I fell in love with as a teenager myself.

I was not prepared for just how impressive the completely renovated Center of the West has become. And maybe I just didn’t remember much about it.

We spent the majority of our time in the Buffalo Bill Museum, exploring the history of a complicated human during a very complicated time in American history. The museum tries to honestly deal with the balance between his failures as a businessman and his success in bringing the American West to the rest of the world. It confronts both the damage his Wild West shows did to the treatment of American indigenous tribes and the imperfect work he did in his later life to make life better for Native Americans. It praises his role as an early women’s rights advocate and his faithlessness as a husband and father. As with all narratives, the museum does everything it can to show how messy history can be, but how important it is to understand all of it.

The Plains Indian Museum contains stunning displays of Native American artifacts, history, and culture. It also ties the past to the present, showing the lives of today’s Native Americans in the West.

And the biggest surprise of all was the Cody Firearms Museum. While I support hunters and the military and I like my fair number of “shooter” movies (because, come on, the scene from The Matrix is unbelievable), I’m not a fan of guns. I’m also a staunch advocate for much stricter, reasonable gun laws.

But the museum wasn’t a celebration of firearms through the ages. It may have over 10,000 artifacts, but it is a carefully curated collection honoring the history of firearms while also recognizing the harm caused by firearms. The war weaponry exhibit includes videos discussing the human and environmental costs of warfare. And it carefully discusses the gun control debate, respecting the concerns of those who want to protect their 2nd Amendment rights while also addressing the very real problems with gun violence in the United States. It is clear the museum is run by people with graduate degrees and not gun enthusiasts.

When we were finally done taking in the museum, our family was ready to continue west and finally arrive in Yellowstone.

I don’t regret calling the travel audible and leaving Custer a day early. I’m glad we got to watch the fireworks outside of Devil’s Tower. I’m glad we cut a stressful drive in half and had a quiet evening to do our laundry and rest before the fullness of Yellowstone. And I’m glad we had the time to spend a couple of hours in Cody, Wyoming. When planning a vacation, sometimes we have to plan for changing plans, and that’s okay.

Because there was so much more excitement ahead of us.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

When I was 15-years-old, my family took an ill-fated trip through the Black Hills. Our first night on the road after leaving our home in Riverton, Wyoming, was Devil’s Tower. My parents, who had never camped on their own, decided our family of six was going to make camping a thing. We were not prepared. We didn’t have the right equipment. And when a sudden Black Hills thunderstorm came up in the middle of the night, my sister Lisa and I stayed dry in our little dome tent while the rest of the family got drenched when their tent collapsed.

It was not a great moment, and it did not convince the four of us girls we should continue camping for the remainder of the vacation, but our parents insisted we keep it up anyway.

The next morning we woke up to glorious blue skies, perfect conditions to climb the boulder field at the base of Devil’s Tower before continuing on to Mount Rushmore. My younger sister Lisa and I scrambled to the top, our dad close on our heels. My mom and two youngest sisters had to stay down on the trail. The climb to the base was one of those core childhood memories that has stuck with me for 30 years.

Which is why, when my husband Jeff and I went to Yellowstone ten years later, I desperately wanted to make that stop. I wanted to show him where my camping career almost ended. He argued we didn’t have the time. After all, we were going over 3000 miles in eight days. And so we drove right past the signs and continued on to Yellowstone.

Order my book to read more about the above camping trips and many more camping experiences over the years.

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So when we planned our big family trip to Yellowstone, I wasn’t going to miss taking my family to Devil’s Tower.

After two full days of exploring monuments, caves, and state parks, we continued two hours west to an RV park about 30 miles away from Devil’s Tower. With the short drive, we arrived in the early afternoon, giving us plenty of time to take care of the dogs before we headed up to the national monument for the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening.

As we got closer to the monument, we could see the giant lonely rock in the middle of piney green hills. Jeff drove along the bottom of the hill and wove up to the line of cars waiting to get into the crowded parking lot. The park has become increasingly popular and cannot accommodate the number of cars it sees all day long. One can park at the bottom and hike at least a mile to the visitor center. Or you can wait for the stoplight to turn green so you can attempt to find a coveted spot. Since we arrived at the park after four, we didn’t have to wait long, but it was long enough for Jeff and I to switch places so I could drive us through the traffic while he took a well-deserved nap.

We visited the visitor center, got our passport stamps and some stickers, and then headed out on the paved trail circling the monument.

It didn’t take long for us to arrive at the same boulder field my sister, dad, and I had climbed 30 years before. Our teenagers took off, our son proving he wasn’t being lazy during his two weeks off from football conditioning and coaxing his big sister to keep following him. They climbed all the way to the trees as Jeff and I climbed a little more carefully to the halfway point between the trail and the tree line.

Experienced rock climbers with equipment and permits are allowed to climb to the top of the national monument, but any other visitors have to stop at the top of the boulder field and climb the fallen rocks at their own risk. As we hiked around the tower, our son kept returning to the field to climb and jump from rock to rock. And when we got to the end of the trail, he asked if he could climb to the top again. Jeff and I found a flat rock to sit and wait for him to finish his climb and then return to us.

Before we left the park, we stopped at the Circle of Sacred Smoke sculpture just outside of the national park campground. It is a stunning sculpture representing the first puff of smoke from a newly lit pipe and is “designed to raise visitor awareness of the importance of the tower to over twenty affiliated tribes.”

Then I made Jeff stop at the prairie dog town on our way out so I could get some pictures of the adorable (and not diseased, like in the Badlands) prairie dogs taking residence in the national monument.

We were originally supposed to celebrate the Fourth of July in Custer, South Dakota, but we were finished with everything we were going to do and we were ready to move on.1 We knew the national park wouldn’t do fireworks (sacred land) but we were told the KOA right outside of the park was still doing fireworks.

It was going to be a long wait. We got to the monument in the late afternoon, but we still had to wait for the park to get dark. We got food from a food truck (and waited forever) and joined tourists and locals traveling to one of the only places in the surrounding area where they would get to watch fireworks.2 As the sun set behind the monument, we watched tiny lights appear along the sides and on top, indicating climbers who were still making the ascent on the massive rock tower.

The fireworks show itself was spectacular, the smoke and sounds lingering in the valley below the national park. It was a late dinner and a late night, but we were glad we had stayed.

Devil’s Tower was the first national monument and is an important part of Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy. It is considered sacred by Northern Plains Indians and indigenous people. It is the focus of fantastic legends and myths. It was the filming location for Stephen Spielberg’s early classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.3 The monument is beautiful, unique, and ties the present to the past. I cannot recommend it enough as a quick stop if you are traveling through eastern Wyoming.

Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Order links

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

When I started planning our summer vacation to Yellowstone, one of my South Dakota goals was to camp at Custer State Park. We were planning to be in the Black Hills around the Fourth of July, so I knew we would need to reserve our stay earlier than later. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize Custer State Park opens up camping reservations one year in advance.

It was an oversight I regretted the moment we entered the state park upon our arrival in the Black Hills.

We headed to Custer State Park after we left Crazy Horse Memorial. We still had plenty of sunlight and weren’t quite done exploring for the day. We knew our next day would be reserved for a cave tour and visit to Mount Rushmore, so we decided to make the most of our afternoon and see what we were missing by not getting a coveted reservation.

We were missing a lot.

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Custer State Park is the eighth-largest state park in the country and the largest state park we have ever visited. That’s saying a lot coming from a family that spent the better part of six years trying to visit every state park possible in Texas.

As we entered the park, we had to decide which region to explore, opting for the Wildlife Loop Road with hopes we would see more bison up close. Instead, we found prairie dog settlements, rolling pine-covered hills, and the gorgeous and informative Bison Center, which presents information on the restoration of bison in the park and the management system in place to keep the herds healthy.

But our real explorations of the state park took place the following day after we left our Jewel Cave Tour.

Jeff’s sister Kristen—who had originally planned to join us on our summer vacation but at the last minute decided she couldn’t—had asked us if we were going to do the Needles Highway drive. We knew far too little about the state park before our vacation to give her a definite answer. When Jeff looked it up while we were in the Badlands, he decided we had to do it. Our original plan had been to do it earlier in the day, but with the shoe debacle before our Jewel Cave tour, our drive was postponed, so we entered the state park after massive storms had worked their way through the region.

While we waited for our tour at Jewel Cave, we could hear the constantly rolling thunder, but since all we ever saw was pea-sized hailstones, we figured the rest of the region got much of the same.

We were wrong. As we entered Custer, we found gumball-sized hail blanketing the ground. Jeff pulled off to the side of the road so we could take a closer look. Apparently, we hadn’t seen the worst part of the storm.

Jeff drove up the Needles Highway and we watched thick pine forests rush past us as he took the truck around tight curves and bends. We stopped to drive past the Black Hills Playhouse and then the Center Lake campground, temporarily thankful we weren’t staying in the state park when we saw the number of campers packing up tents and pop-ups as they assessed hail damage.

But when we pulled off to the parking lot for Center Lake, we reconsidered. This is what we were missing by not staying in the state park.

Despite the hailstone divots in the sand, the lake was stunning and surprisingly warm. The regional highs had hovered around 70 during our stay in the Black Hills, but the lake was still inviting and we probably would have wanted to go swimming if we were camping nearby. We were only a few miles into our drive on Needles and we were back to longing for a campsite unavailable to us.

Then we continued up the highway.

We had told the kids the beauty they witnessed in the Badlands wouldn’t compare to what they would see in Yellowstone, which they found hard to believe. What Jeff and I didn’t know was the beauty along Needles would blow the Badlands out of the water and set the bar high for our trip to Yellowstone.

The further Jeff drove up the highway, the more we found to take our breath away. It wasn’t just the nerves from squeezing our way through three narrow tunnels; it was the rock peaks reaching to the now-blue sky. It was the canyons below. It was the realization that this was the most beautiful state park we had ever seen. It felt like we had left South Dakota behind entirely.

We ended our drive at Sylvan Lake, stopping to take it in. As our son and I walked along the lake path, we discovered even more to explore around the corner. The temperatures had dropped below 50 and I was thankful I had brought long sleeves along for the drive. Jeff gave up his jacket and handed it to our daughter, who gratefully took it as we continued as a family on the path toward the lake dam before turning around and stopping at the Sylvan Lake gift shop.

I don’t know if Jeff and I will ever get back to the Black Hills, but we have put Custer State Park on our wish list. It is beautiful and helped to put a bow on our short stay in the region.

And for more pictures and video of the drive through the park, check out the video below:

Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Order links

Order links

While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

By the time I planned my family’s vacation west to Yellowstone, I had traveled through the Black Hills three times. On all three of those trips, I had stopped at Mount Rushmore and driven right past Crazy Horse. I looked out the car window each time and wondered about the memorial. I watched the slow progress. And somehow I knew I was missing something in my Black Hills experience by not visiting the largest mountain sculpture in the world.

So when I planned our trip to Yellowstone, I determined that my whole family would make visiting the memorial a priority.

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Because our drive from the Badlands was only about two and a half hours to our campsite in the Black Hills, we had plenty of time after our arrival to a new location to check at least one item off of our Black Hills bucket list. I decided to make Crazy Horse our first stop.

Less than 20 minutes later, we had paid for our tickets and were parked. I took pictures of the statue from the parking lot, excited to finally see what all the fuss was about and learn more about the mission of the memorial.

What is the Crazy Horse Memorial? In the 1940s, Chief Henry Standing Bear, a longstanding advocate for the Lakota people, asked sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve a memorial in the Black Hills to honor his people. Ziolkowski was already a successful sculptor when he was asked to assist with Mount Rushmore during the summer of 1939. Eventually he enlisted in World War II and was wounded at Omaha Beach. Although he was invited to make government war memorials in Europe after the war, he chose to accept Chief Standing Bear’s invitation to work on the Crazy Horse Memorial. He would spend the rest of his life working on the sculpture he would never see completed.

Ziolkowski refused to take government funding for the project, depending on private donations to keep the project going. He wanted the grounds to be a place that honored the local indigenous tribes and history and encouraged furthing the education and artistic endeavors of the people. His children and grandchildren have kept his dream alive and continue to carve the mountain and keep the entire complex alive and growing.

The memorial site is so much more than just the statue. There is an expansive museum with Native American artifacts and art created by local artisans. The museum complex has been built up around the original Ziolkowski home and Korczak’s studio. There is an educational and cultural center where local Native Americans continue to meet and create, often displaying their artistic talents to visitors at the museum who can see their art and enjoy music and dance performances throughout the year. The basement of the cultural center has a fascinating museum discussing the history of bison in America. And while it is located away from the main complex, the campus also hosts a university focused on meeting the educational needs of Native Americans from across the United States.

While we could have chosen to pay for a bus ride to the base of the mountain for a closer look, we felt like we had seen and learned enough from the museum. I was glad we made the stop a priority, and that we had visited Crazy Horse before we made the trip to Mount Rushmore.

Ah, Mount Rushmore.

I have a long history with the national monument.

The first time I visited the monument was when I was 11. My dad, his cousin, and my sister Lisa, and I were on way way back to Illinois from my uncle’s wedding in Washington. As part of our long drove home, we made stops at Little Bighorn and Mount Rushmore.

Then, on our family’s fateful camping trip when I was 15, we made another stop at Mount Rushmore, as pictured below.

When my husband Jeff said he wanted to go to Yellowstone in 2004, Mount Rushmore was on his short list of places he knew he wanted to see along the way. When we arrived in the Black Hills it was hot. We baked as we walked in the sun to the visitor center and watched the films and strolled through the museum. When we finally got to hiking the loop to look at the monument up close, the sun sat right behind the faces, making it difficult and uncomfortable to see the entire sculpture. Let’s just say my husband’s first visit to the national monument was not very monumental.

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Somehow, I keep coming back to the monument over and over again, and each time I have a different experience, a different rush of emotions as I stand in front of the state flags that have been a part of my life and then view the presidential faces rising in the background.

This time, I tried to view it through my children’s eyes.

Our teenagers are not naive. They are inquisitive, well read, and understand the world is complex. After our visit at Crazy Horse, as we drove through Custer State Park, we talked about Chief Standing Bear and his probable experiences as a student at Carlisle school. We talked about Indian boarding schools and the ways children were tortured. We talked about the concept of “Kill the Indiana, save the man.” We talked about mass graves of children discovered outside of boarding schools in Canada and the First Nations. We didn’t talk about those things to depress our children or make them angry at their country. In fact, they were more irritated at the education system than they were at the United States, asking why they were learning about that stuff from their parents and not in their social studies classes. We talked about those things because I want my kids to see their country for all that it is, the good and the bad.

And so, as we walked around the grounds of Mount Rushmore this time, I tried to hold that complexity in both of my hands. Our kids proudly stood in front of both the Texas and Indiana flags, embracing both states as important parts of their history. We talked about the original plan for Mount Rushmore, the inclusion of Western heroes like Red Cloud, Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody. We talked about why, in the 1930s, these four presidents would be the ones who would end up on the mountain. We even told them that because of their love for national parks, Teddy Roosevelt should be their favorite former president. As a family, we sat through the film about the creation of the monument and walked around the museum. We visited the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota Heritage Village on the path to the monument and listened to the guides as they discussed Lakota language and music. And our family enjoyed the trail taking us through the many views of the monument and to Borglum’s stunning studio where the park still displays his work-in-progress model.

It had been a long time since I was able to hold all of the complexity that is Mount Rushmore in my head and heart. But this time I could. The sun was in the right position. The temperature was perfect. And we could enjoy the monument for what it is: a stunning achievement portraying four very different and important flawed men who significantly shaped our country unto what it is today, for better and for worse.

All four men did tremendous good in the formation and development of our country. And all four men were also deeply flawed and caused great harm to certain populations in our country, including those whose land the monument was build on. I know we need to embrace the both/and when we talk about our heroes. True patriotism doesn’t turn a blind eye to the truth. It looks the truth in the eye and says, “Now, how can we do better? How can we make this right?”

And in what might be my last visit to the national monument (but never say never), I believe I can say the National Parks Service is doing what it can to do just that.

Perfect solutions may not be available to us, but as I walked past a park ranger doing a demonstration with several park visitors holding an American flag, I was reminded why I have hope. He talked about freedom of speech. He talked about the need to listen to others, even when we don’t agree. And he spoke with the passion and conviction I have come to expect from these civil servants.

When I asked the kids, our daughter said Crazy Horse was her favorite. Our son said Mount Rushmore was his. And while they both appreciated both mountain sculptures, it made sense. Different sculptures and experiences speak to their very different personalities. But they were glad we saw both, and so am I.

Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of 2024.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

Ever since moving back to Indiana, my husband Jeff and I keep saying it over and over again: why didn’t we come here before? We keep discovering so many places we didn’t visit when we were young and childless and had so much more freedom than we did when we started camping with our kids.

And we recognize that part of the reason was we didn’t adventure nearly as much as we thought we did. We had our old haunts in Michigan where we camped and we had our favorite parks in Indiana and we didn’t do much more. We didn’t have much time to try new places. If we were going to go camping, we wanted to know what we were getting ourselves into.

That is probably why we never tried out Prophetstown State Park, which was brand new when we first lived in Indianapolis.

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As we prepared for a summer camping season that started Memorial Day weekend and included our epic trip out to Yellowstone, Jeff started looking at other state parks we could squeeze in during the two months the kids and I were off from school. He got on the waiting list for a handful of parks we wanted to visit for weekend camping trips. The first to come up was our mid-June trip to Turkey Run State Park. On our way to Turkey Run, he got a message that a spot had opened up at Prophetstown, a place that looked ideal for late summer. So even though it meant we would be camping two weekends after a two-week trip out west and mere days before we all started school, we jumped on it.

Our son invited one of his best friends to join us so we had three kids for the weekend. Almost as soon as we arrived, they all took off, the boys on bikes and our daughter walking to the playground just to check it out. Once we had camp set up and dinner prepared, we were able to sit in front of a campfire with the sun setting over the prairie grass behind our site.

The kids couldn’t wait to explore the next day. Prophetstown has a five-mile paved bike trail that goes through the entire park, making it easy to safely get from one location to the next. The boys were ready to go to the state park pool as soon as it opened and our daughter wanted to join me to check out the farmer’s market at the farm on site, so we temporarily split. The farmer’s market was nothing more than an offering of meat and a variety of eggs from the working farm in the park, but it was still a fun display of the history of farming in Indiana. The two houses on the farm are Sears Roebuck houses, so it was fun to explain to my 15-year-old how people used to be able to buy houses from a catalog and have all of the parts delivered to their empty land. The bigger house, which was open, reminded me a lot of my great-grandmother’s house in Iowa, which brought back a lot of childhood memories.

Then we joined the boys back at the state park pool. There are several Indiana state parks with pools open during the summer months, but this was the nicest pool we had ever visited. For $5 a piece, we had access to two slides, a lazy river, and other swim areas.

With temperatures in the mid-80s, it was a perfect day to visit a water park. The whole family had fun on the tube slide and our son and his friend went down the body slide more times than we could count. We got our money’s worth from the afternoon, and since we were staying at the campground, we could ride our bikes back and forth to get lunch.

Once everyone rested from an entire afternoon in the sun, the boys took off to find the kids they had met while at the pool, joining in a random game of kickball at the end of our camping loop. We stayed back at the campsite where Jeff and I made dinner and Jeff and our daughter played a few rounds of cornhole before the boys came back to play against them. Honestly, it was everything a good camping day should be.

We experienced another glorious Indiana sunset before going to bed. I even got to take a few pictures of my latest book at the campground before its September release.

Was the weekend perfect? No. Our daughter forgot her bathing suit, so I drove with her to Lafayette late Friday night to piece something together. (Yes, I could have made our 15-year-old suffer for not paying attention to the packing list I gave her, but the pool was supposed to be a family activity.) Our son’s friend got stomach pains Saturday night and his dad had to come and get him. (He’s okay now.) And it started raining on Sunday morning while we packed up, which prevented us from doing a little more biking and exploring the Native American village by the visitor center. But it was still a really good weekend and we found a new Indiana state park to fall in love with.

Not back for camping on a whim right before school starts, right?

Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

It’s summer, which means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

The first time Jeff and I traveled to Yellowstone, the Badlands were not on my itinerary.

I had never heard of the national park before, even with a few drives through South Dakota during my childhood. I knew about Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, and that was our destination. It was a long drive from our overnight stop in Souix Falls to the KOA I had reserved near Mount Rushmore. We didn’t have much time to sightsee on our way across the state.

But we had already determined we needed to stop at Wall Drug. And then Jeff saw the sign.

“Look, there’s Badlands National Park. Should we stop?”

I had a schedule to keep. “Why would we want to stop in the Badlands? It doesn’t sound like a good place to stop.”

I was wrong. I was so wrong. In the short drive to the visitor center, we discovered a beautiful, rugged desert landscape that took my breath away. I suddenly regretted our need to get to the Black Hills before sunset.

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So when we planned to take our kids to Yellowstone, Jeff and I both agreed that we needed at least one full day to explore Badlands National Park. I reserved two nights in Wall, South Dakota and hoped we would have enough daylight after we arrived to at least drive into the national park on our first night. A stop to see the Corn Palace in Mitchell put us a little behind schedule and the kids wanted to explore Wall Drug once we parked our camper. Daylight was fading fast and a storm was building in the west, but I wasn’t giving up on seeing the sunset in the park after we ate dinner.

Before we went to bed, I wanted our kids to see why we made seeing the Badlands a priority for this vacation. The storm clouds hung over far western regions of the park, but Jeff drove toward the entrance closest to Wall then turned onto Sage Creek Rim Road. Immediately, the prairie opened up into deep, dry canyons of rock formations reaching into the sky, the layers of sandstones, siltstones, mudstones, claystones, limestones, volcanic ash, and shale showing different hues as they reflected the colors from the setting sun.1 The pictures we had shown our children before our vacation had not prepared them for what they would see along the rim. Our daughter was speechless. All day she had watched the landscape of farmland mixed with long prairie grass waving in wind.

“What happened to my screensaver?” she finally asked. We laughed, because it was a pretty apt description of what we had seen all day.

As Jeff continued the drive up the road along the rim, we watched bison frolicking in the prairie. A few ambled up and across the road in front of us and other park visitors trying to drive to the best place to watch the sunset. Jeff stopped multiple times to wait for another bison to cross the road, the massive beasts not caring in the least that they had interruped our sunset viewing experience, making it clear they ruled the plains.

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The rain held off, allowing the sun to slowly drop into the break in the storm clouds. As we watched the sunset over the South Dakota plains, my 15-year-old daughter wrapped her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder. Together we watched the golden sun dip beneath the horizon, the red glow reflected on the rugged landscape behind us. Our vacation had officially started, and I couldn’t wait to explore the park once the sun came up.

Vacation mode also meant our family slept until mid-morning, even though we had changed two time zones in our drive west. We were quickly learning to change some expectations as we traveled with two teenagers now. We packed up water bottles and snacks and traveled to the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, nearly 30 minutes away. On our way, we stopped to hike the Window Trail, which was more a “choose your own adventure” hike with the goal of reaching numbered posts that told us we were going in the right direction. We quickly discovered that the trail restrictions in Badlands National Park are far looser than in any other park we have visited, mostly because the constantly changing landscape due to natural erosion of the tightly packed rock and mud formations. We climbed up and down the formations, looking for natural landbridges until we reached the final post.

Unfortunately, our daughter also twisted her ankle as we reached the midway point of the hike. It didn’t end the hike, but it certainly put into question our ability to do any more long hikes for the day. The sting came off of the injury after lunch, but it was still tender for a few days.

After a quick visit to the visitor center and spending more money in the park store, we enjoyed our lunch at the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, just outside of the national park.

Then Jeff got to fulfill one of his wishes for the park, driving the unimproved portion of the Sheep Mountain Road all the way to the top of Sheep Mountain Table.

The first time Jeff convinced me to take the road less travelled was when we were on our family vacation to Arches National Park. When we visited Canyonlands, he decided he wanted to test the limits of our F-150 and take the road through the canyon on our return to Moab. I had my doubts and spent most of the drive holding onto the handle next to my door, but he was right. The drive was stunning. Then, when we spent three days exploring Big Bend National Park, he insisted we go off-roading again. And again, it took us to a beautiful hike we wouldn’t have otherwise known existed.

So when Jeff said he wanted to drive to the top of Sheep Mountain Table, who was I to argue?

The drive initially took us on a dirt road along the canyon floor, but then we climbed up the mountain. When we saw the sign for “High Clearance Vehicles Only,” Jeff continued up the path, following the tire treads of those who had gone before us. We bounced along the road, eventually following a park ranger’s advice when he passed us and told us to take the left side of the road instead of the right, where we were trying to stay out of the way of those coming back down from the top. We watched the storm clouds grow as we worked our way to the top, and by the time we got back to the main road, we saw lightning streaks. The drive had been worth it and we finished it just in time.

After spending more money shopping in Wall and eating dinner, we headed back to the park for one last experience. The park rangers were doing a night program at the Ben Reifel Visitor Center and we wanted to see the Badlands night sky. The first ranger talked about prairie dogs and the efforts to bring back the black-footed ferrett to the plains. The prairie dogs of the Badlands are currently experiencing a form of bubonic plague, so there are signs everywhere telling visitors to avoid getting close, but we learned that one of the reasons this is so problematic is prairie dogs are a keystone species. They are essential to the survival of many other species on the plains, including the nearly extinct black-footed ferret. Current conservation efforts to bring back the black-footed ferret includes cloning technology. It was a fascinating and wholly unexpected presentation.

We wrapped up the night learning more about constellations and planets and looking at the night sky through the telescopes provided by the park rangers. While the sky wasn’t quite as bright as in Big Bend many years ago, it was still an impressive sight and we were glad we had made the effort to return to the park one more time.

The Badlands may be a difficult place to live and thrive, but it is absolutely worth visiting. While the landscape may be inhospitable, the views are stunning and the life that does thrive there will take your breath away. It was the perfect national park to start our family vacation.

Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.

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Long road trips require stops to keep everyone happy. It’s even better when those stops can be in fun, sometimes ridiculous places.

And we were not above ridiculous fun as we headed out west on our 2024 summer vacation.

The I-80 Truck Stop

The I-80 Truck Stop in Iowa is not new to me. I went to college in Nebraska, so I drove past the largest truck stop in the world multiple times a year as I drove from Michigan to Nebraska and back to Michigan. I stopped a few times, but since it didn’t really fit into my “stop every three hours” plan, I usually just drove right past.

When Jeff and I drove out to Colorado for our first camping trip together the summer before we got married, the I-80 stop was a must. We were driving from Michigan to Colorado and through the night. We looked for every stop we could to keep us going out west and I-80 became a necessary stop for gas and food before we continued on our way.

When we left our first Harvest Host stop on our 2024 summer vacation, we quickly approached the Iowa border. I turned around and asked, "Hey kids, do you want to stop at the world's largest truck stop?"

Our 13-year-old son, out of a sleepy stupor, said "Yeah," like that was the dumbest question ever. Of course he wanted to see it. How could I believe he would pass of seeing “The World’s Largest” anything?

Our kids lived in Texas for six years. Buc-ee’s was a frequent stop as we traveled around Texas and they’ve become increasingly excited to see Buc-ee’s spreading throughout the southeast, so they have pretty high expectations when it comes to gas station/truck stops.

Both kids agreed that as a stand-alone stop, the I-80 truck stop was the best gas station/truck stop they had ever visited. They were amazed by the multiple floors and the stores that just just kept going. But our son said that Buc-ee’s is still his favorite. He’ll probably always be part-Texan, no matter where he lives.

Still, they had no regrets about our stop, even if we were only an hour into our long drive.

The Corn Palace

Immediately after we crossed the South Dakota border, we stopped at the South Dakota welcome center along I-90. As we looked around the displays of all the attractions around the state, our daughter saw the pictures of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.

I had known about the Corn Palace for years, but I had never stopped during my few trips through South Dakota.

“Mom,” she asked. “How far are we going to be staying from the Corn Palace?”

“Too far,” I said. “It is literally on our way to Wall, but you’ll have to convince your dad to stop.”

We kept seeing signs. They were funny and they didn’t make our daughter want to see the tourist trap any less. Finally Jeff said, “Find out if they have trailer parking.”

They did. And so Jeff pulled off the interstate in Mitchell, South Dakota so we could tour the Corn Palace.

I had no idea what to expect. I knew the outside was changed every year with a new theme and art created from corn. I knew it would have a lot of merchandise. But I didn’t expect it to be a place for public performances and sporting events. We eventually entered a large entertainment space filled with venders selling all manner of corn related merchandise. We bought a few souvineers, the kids got popcorn, and we bought corn-shaped caramel corn.

And our 15-year-old daughter was weirdly thrilled, so I guess it was worth the stop. I also didn’t mind having a good place for a lunch break, even if it meant getting lunch items out of our camper before we continued down the road.

Wall Drug

Oh Wall Drug. How does one start explaining Wall Drug?

First of all, we saw our first sign for Wall Drug shortly after we left our Harvest Host stop in Minnesota. We were nearly 400 miles away from the Badlands and we were already seeing our first advertisements for the tourist trap in the middle of nowhere in western South Dakota.

Jeff and I made our first stop at the Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota when we took our vacation out to Yellowstone 20 years ago. After several hours of seeing sign after sign for the store, we couldn’t not stop.

This time we were staying at an RV park in Wall, South Dakota while we spent a day and a half visiting the Badlands. Our family had multiple opportunities to visit the ever-expanding series of shops still known as Wall Drug.

We walked around the shops, Jeff ate a buffalo hot dog, and the kids convinced us to do the mine adventure as a family at the Wall Drug Mining Company, part of the Backyard portion of the Wall Drug chain of stores and experiences.

Is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it a tourist trap? Yes. Is it fun and worth the stop? Yes. And since we were staying a short walk away, we didn’t have to rush our decisions about what we were going to do there and immediately decide what we were going to buy.

A win for all of us.

When you are on a 4,000+ mile road trip, you have to find the fun little stops that break up the monotony of endless stretches of road. It is important for both the driver and the passengers. We’ve discovered that sometimes, even the most ridiculous of those stops can add to the adventure.

Want do know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

Trip Planning Spreadsheet

Support my writing

Pre-order links

Order links

While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.

Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

And thank you for supporting my journey 💗