Oregon Trail-Inspired Parenting Hacks, Part 1
See if we care, soaring gas prices! Here's what we learned after packing up our children and embodying the pioneer spirit over 4,000 miles in our air-conditioned van.
In the spirit of the pioneers, Titus (left), Phoebe, Micah and Ezra dedicate themselves to the forthcoming journey on the Oregon Trail. Their enthusiasm is palpable.
After two weeks of vacation-inspired negligence, I’m back at the writing desk and ready to share some more parenting foibles (masquerading as wisdom). Thank you, dear reader, for your patience as I stepped away for our family’s first-ever American roadtrip along the Oregon Trail.
Over the next three weeks, I’m delighted to pass along some learnings and our actual point-by-point journey in case you’d like to gently pack your loved ones into a tin can for 66 hours and putter around for 4,349 miles (give or take 1,000). It's more fun than you might think! Use hashtag #BathroomsOfAmericaTour on your journey for the chance to win another unexpected stop along a windswept interstate with the son or daughter of your choice. In fact, why not all pile out and enjoy the sights and sounds of automated sinks and hand dryers designed to strip at least two layers of your skin clean off? Try it sometime!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Honestly, stepping away from work and daily responsibilities for the longest block of time since high school made me realize something shocking and wonderful. Happiness is not only possible but fully achievable if you’re willing to seek it out and get yourself into a new frame of mind. Stepping out of your comfortable surroundings and into a new environment makes it easier for your brain to make the switch. (Not always practical amid the daily hubbub, but even a trip into town can help my mind do a hard reset, I’ve discovered.)
Without further ado, here’s Part 1 of the pioneer route we traveled and the parenting hacks I learned at each stop alongside Julie and our four kiddos. Before proceeding, feel free to brush up on your Oregon Trail history. You can also order a copy of The Oregon Trail Card Game, based on the computer game some of us played back in elementary school in the 1990s. Julie got this for our vacation and the kids had a ball seeing who would die first from dysentery.
Parenting Hack #1: You gotta start somewhere or you’ll never get up the gumption to go (Independence, Mo.)
We debated for a long time how to get to Oregon. See, we wanted to visit my brother and his wife in the Pacific Northwest, and we had a few options. Walking seemed obvious but a little time-consuming. Flying costs money (47% price hikes since January?!?) and potentially breeds disease (OK, maybe not) or snakes, depending on who’s seated next to you. In fact, statistics show flying is more dangerous than being on the Oregon Trail. It’s also WAY faster. Sometimes, life is just a giant tradeoff soup.
We even put a down payment on a rental RV, only to discover how we’d be nickel and dimed at every revolution of its tires.
Funny us, we decided to switch to a 20-year-old popup camper and the family minivan. Julie got us all organized with weeks of careful research and planning. We loaded the kids in early on a Monday morning and promised to release them on good behavior once we reached the ocean.
Our first leg of the trip took us to Independence, Mo., where the Oregon Trail (and many other trails throughout history, as it turns out) began. We found a largely empty parking lot in which to drop the van and camper and walked the few blocks to the town square, where a red stone monument proclaims, “Here The Oregon Trail Began.”
Most of those poor pioneers probably had a limited picture of exactly what they’d experience on the Oregon Trail. Julie and I didn’t know all the wonders (and whining! And snacks!) we’d encounter.
But there are some things in life you’ve just gotta shoulder through on. You’ll never know what’s on the other side unless you get started. That hack has served us well ever since we became parents. Sure, it’s scary. Now keep moving!
Parenting Hack #2: Find the nearest swimming pool (Lincoln, Neb.)
After our exhausting two-block hike to the start of the Oregon Trail, we continued west to Lincoln, Neb., where we camped the first Monday of our trip. We set up the camper and set about finding a way to entertain the children.
Let me just lay it out there: I’m the world’s most unfun dad. Any activity that involves changing everyone’s wardrobe, assembling mounds of gear or enduring incessant questions such as “When are we going? How long do we get to stay?” tend to be fairly unattractive to me. So when the children saw the campground had a swimming pool, I knew it was the beginning of the end.
“Now, we get to do all of the things on my least-favorite-activities list, plus get soaking wet and track it through the camper!” I ruefully grumped.
But you know what? Actually, it was a lot of fun to go swimming with the kids. It’s especially fun when there’s hardly a soul around, the pool is a safe depth and you’re nowhere near home, and you’ve got the dog days of summer stretching before you.
And things stayed dry once we got back to our campsite. Mostly. I think we lost a towel. At least it wasn’t a child.
Parenting Hack #3: Instill healthy panic with a check-engine light to help your children become problem-solvers (Cheyenne, Wyo.)
Around the Birt house, we have a saying: Be problem solvers, not problem makers. I threw that advice clean out the window the moment the check-engine light came on not 10 minutes after we left Lincoln and started toward Wyoming.
How could this be happening? Hadn’t our local auto shop given the van a thorough once-over before we departed? Was I really going to have to wait two-plus weeks to see how the latest season of “Stranger Things” ends? What was I doing with my life? Oh, the humanity!
Then my wife talked sense into me, suggesting we pull over and ask directions to the nearest auto shop. (No, we didn’t turn around and head to the one back home, despite my pleading. Kidding! I never suggested that. Not out loud, anyway. Kidding! Haha. I laugh when I’m nervous. Or terrified of a DEFCON1 engine explosion on the High Plains.)
The friendly gas station attendants at our randomly selected stop proved very helpful and pointed us to a mechanic just a few miles off the highway. Helpfully, the shop took my call and agreed to read the engine error. Upon arrival, the person on duty leapt (literally, he was that eager to help! And potentially bored?) to help us and quickly scanned the engine using the reader thingy owned by auto shops across America.
He said it appeared to be a problem with engine—you could have knocked me over with a feather—specifically something to do with a sensor indicating it wasn’t running as efficiently as possible. He noted the van should be safe to drive and suggested the extra weight of pulling a camper could be the culprit, suggesting we consider replacing its spark plugs at the next available shop. We thanked this friendly man for his time, thanked our lucky stars he’d cleared out the engine code and proceeded on our way.
The van never overheated, and we made it every bit of the way to Oregon and back. The check engine light kept popping on. Over the course of the trip, we visited five shops, replaced the oil, had the spark plugs replaced—and kept watching as the yellow check engine light greeted our groggy shortly-after-dawn faces.
After a while, we became numb to it. You might even say it became the seventh passenger on our epic journey. And when we arrived back home two weeks later, we took it into another auto shop—the one that fixes our peskiest and hardest-to-crack problems—and got a new sensor. Absolutely nothing proved wrong with the engine or the health of the vehicle. It literally just needed help with its computer parts to ensure it’s reading oil levels properly.
That’s the best part about problem-solving. Sometimes, you just need to delegate it and move on.
Parenting Hack #4: When you encounter a hill in life, keep on climbing (Laramie, Wyo.)
Did you know there are hills in Wyoming? There are hills in Wyoming. Some people call them mountains. Our oldest son, Micah, debated which designation applied and emphatically landed in the “hill” camp. Later research confirmed the big rolling rocks are, in fact, part of a mountain range.
I drove a majority of miles on this trip, primarily because I enjoy driving, there was nothing else to do and it made me feel super in control, which is very masculine and completely misleading. How can you be in control of a roadtrip where nearly every destination is new, your children’s demands are unpredictable and check engine lights threaten to foil your hard-fought plans? If men had a theme, it would be, “Pretending To Be In Control Since Eden.”
Mountain driving is particularly fun when you have 2,000 lb. of extra cargo hooked and chained to a tiny little surface area near your back bumper. That didn’t stop us. One helpful piece of advice from the Wyoming shop that upgraded our spark plugs (Shop 2 of 5, for those keeping score) was to maintain a speed of 65 mph or less to avoid ruining our transmission across the up-and-down-and-up-again western U.S.
That one recommendation probably saved us thousands of dollars in repairs and kept us sane. It almost became a mantra. I can do virtually anything—at 65 mph!
The other recommendation I will offer you for free, whether you are a wife, the husband of a wife, or single and laughing hysterically at this comedy of a caravan, is: If your driving partner hates mountain driving and is terrified of the next steep descent or vertical climb, encourage them to look at the amazing view while you barrel on toward your doom. I made sure to point out all of the things Julie was missing out on as we dipped and soared our way across the bumpy terrain of Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon.
Several museums we pointed out featured hysterical quotes from the pre-Oregon Trail days, ones in which the “experts” claimed no barriers existed between the flatland and the ocean. I can assure you, those people would now have good-paying jobs on cable TV or The New York Times.
Parenting Hack #5: Make the effort, dig the fossils (Kemmerer, Wyo.)
Micah had just one request on our trip. He wanted to dig for fossils. Lucky for him, Julie had discovered Fossil Safari in Kemmerer, Wyo. On the computer screen, it looked fun. On the Google map, it looked awfully bumpy.
Wisely, Julie suggested dropping the camper at a local RV park, and she came through with an RV park-restaurant combo. We could have lunch at the restaurant and park it for free, or drop the camper and pay $20. We chose to eat and enjoy the local food (fantastic) and people (super friendly).
While waiting for our food, we each used crayons to sketch murals on blank white rectangles of paper provided by our server. Titus, our No. 2 son, had serenaded us with tortured wails at regular intervals in the van. I intended to draw a picture depicting him bumming a ride, the premise being that we’d decided to drop him off on the side of the highway. I accidentally wrote the wrong name on my cartoon, though, meaning Micah had the imaginary misfortune of being abandoned on a desert road with a pronghorn antelope standing nearby asking, “What’s his prong-lem?” (My humor works best on those 12 and under, and even this joke failed to stick the landing with our kiddo crowd.)
After lunch, we bid the camper adieu and drove up the mountain along a winding road managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. We followed the instructions listed on the fossil digging place’s website: Cross the three or four cattle guards, make a left at the diamond-shaped rock, yell loudly for a medic. (I think that last one was a thing?) After what seemed like forever, though, we made it, just as the internet said we would.
The fossil dig operates on private land owned by a rancher, and the experience proved well worth the drive. A friendly man who enjoys treasure hunting in his retirement arrives every day for work at this location and spends hours helping would-be paleontologists like us dig up evidence of the past. We each donned safety goggles, grabbed hammers and chisels, and made our way into the dust-covered field of sandy slate-like rocks piled in 10- to 20-foot mounds. Heavy equipment and hand tools operated nearby as more seasoned fossil hunters sought out rare turtles and stingrays. Our crew stuck to the smaller rocks, chiseling thin sheets of rock away one at a time to reveal—surprisingly often—fish and sea shells hidden inside.
It's a delicate art. The fossils, which illustrate the area’s past history as a lake, are rust-colored and subject to fading away at the touch of a curious finger or a misguided chisel strike. By the end of our hour of digging, we’d uncovered dozens of whole and partial fossils, and we then selected our favorites to bring home with us. The boys and, yes, even Phoebe seemed to get a kick out of the experience, despite the occasional shoving and harsh words that erupted over fears younger siblings might crush or maim the older siblings’ precious fossil finds.
If anyone has suggestions for storing and framing a 20-lb. plastic tub of old rocks, I’m all ears.
P.S. Next week, I’ll take you out to Soda Springs, Idaho—a favorite of the pioneers and a big ol’ two thumbs down from our crew. There, we’ll unpack Parenting Hack #6: Some bubbles are meant to be burst. Until then, thanks for reading and see you soon right back at The Silver Maple Memo!
Read Oregon Trail-Inspired Parenting Hacks, Part 2 and Oregon Trail-Inspired Parenting Hacks, Part 3
P.P.S. If you’ve read this far, thank you! Next week, I’ll be doing a free giveaway of my embryo adoption guidebook—“Frozen, But Not Forgotten”—designed for prospective parents and anyone who’s embryo-adoption curious. If you have a family member or friend who’s interested in parenting, family or adoption issues, forward this newsletter and ask them to subscribe to The Silver Maple Memo. They’ll automatically get a free printed copy of the book, and trust me—these books will do way more good on their shelves than in boxes in my basement!