Camp Creek Press

There is nothing like a two-week road trip with two boys age 7 and 10 for getting in touch with your inner child. The line between childlike wonder and childish tantrum is admittedly thin, but there are so many things you wouldn't do without a medium-sized boy yanking your arm in that direction (mammoth museum!) and so many things you wouldn't spend nearly as much time doing without a medium-sized boy's infectious enthusiasm (eating ice cream). (Pictured: Seven-year-old boy drawing comics in our 1973 Airstream -- dig that groovy orange!)

Our biggest travel aid on a previous long road trip to Quebec was a car DVD player (two screens!). I cannot be shamed about this; when you are forcing small children to endure many hours in the 2/3-size third-row seat of an SUV stuffed with adults, you must at least offer them Looney Tunes. Our car DVD player even has A/V in/out so the boys could use their plug-and-play Ms. Pacman game -- and one screen could run the cartoons while the other ran Pacman! This bought us hours and hours of blissful silence from the way-back seat.

So, imagine my chagrin when, 60 miles into this 3750-mile trip, I realized I had somehow neglected to pack the power cord for the DVD player.

And what entertained the two medium-sized boys for their very long car ride to and from Wyoming? They had a tote bag filled with Calvin and Hobbes books and personal canvas bags packed with, among other things, blank journals, pens, markers, colored pencils, and glue sticks. We also make a travel journal when we take a significant trip, but they also had an additional blank book which serendipitously became a place to draw Calvin and Hobbes (an artistic homage) and make up their own comic strips. This entertained them for hours -- nay, entire days -- of driving.

I want to share their trip journals (I make one, too), but first, here's a peek inside the boys' travel bags, good for two weeks traveling through the windy, sun-scorched west:

ten-year-old's:

seven-year-old's: