And 2024 Plans!
If you’re a social media user, you can follow our adventures – we use the hashtags #WarnersGoneWild and #warnerfamadventures in our posts — and I post in Instagram and Facebook under the @DrCathyNMC moniker.
If you have priced out summer camps, sports camps, and week long away adventures for kids, you know they’re not cheap. $1000+. Equipment. In our case, a special diet for the kid with massive food allergies….. So, what do you do with your kids to keep them engaged and learning for the summer? I took mine traveling across the US, for less than the cost of 2 weeks of summer camps.
In our household, we made the decision that for Summer 2023, we’d do something else instead of camps. Enter the Frontier Airlin
es “Go Wild” All-you-can-fly airpass. For $500, the kids and I each purchased a pass and traveled across the US throughout the summer. Frontier gets a bad rap sometimes, but we had minimal issues (only slight delays) and no problems with bags (we also pack light!).
es “Go Wild” All-you-can-fly airpass. For $500, the kids and I each purchased a pass and traveled across the US throughout the summer. Frontier gets a bad rap sometimes, but we had minimal issues (only slight delays) and no problems with bags (we also pack light!).How it works: You can book 24 hours (aka Midnight the day before) before departure and only pay $.01 + the taxes for the flights, if seats are available. It works out to just under $15. There are blackout dates, listed well in advance. Yes, you are departing somewhere without having a return flight booked. You need to be flexible. That part of the adventure is part of the fun. We usually had two sets of bags packed — one to go south and one to go west. Frontier flies out of Grand Rapids – direct flights to Denver and also Orlando – and you can connect pretty much everywhere they fly from those two hubs.
If you’re wondering, we did this with each of us with a personal item (small backpack), and 1 carry-on that contains our air mattresses, a 3 person tent, our camping dishes/cookware, and an air pump. Grocery pick up from Walmart takes care of food and sleeping bags (they’re $15/each for the light ones).
As a mom, I want to instill the love of travel and adventure in my kids. I want them to understand difference, privilege, and honor and respect the diversity of our nation. We believe in “experiences, not things”. [Exception – my son is a rockhound…. we do collect rocks and fossils!] It’s seeing places. It’s interacting with people. It’s learning. And it’s always an adventure.
Our first adventure brought us to 4 states: Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. We have camped along the Green River with 10,000 sheep who sounded like zombies bleating out “brains” [say it like a sheep, you’ll get it]. We split 100’s of lbs. of rocks to find fish fossils in Kemmerer, WY. We visited 2 national park/monuments – Fossil Butte National Monument & Dinosaur National Monument. We retraced the path of Colorado’s “Great American Diamond Fields” Hoax. We even went spelunking in an Idaho cave. We made lots of memories – laughed, cried, and yes – survived an imaginary zombie apocalypse orchestrated by the imagination of an 8 yr. old and 10,000 sheep.
We made a few different trips down to Florida using our pass. One of which we hopped over to San Juan, PR for 4 days / 3 nights, exploring the island and culture. One the flight down, I taught the kids some basic Spanish – hello, friend, thank you, your welcome, good bye — you know, the basics. Fast forward 24 hours, my son greets EVERY PERSON ON THE WALKWAYS with a “Hola Amigo!”. After a brief conversation of why we might not want to talk to strangers, my son then pointed out that if I hadn’t wanted for him to talk to strangers, I probably shouldn’t have taught him Spanish. Fair point, kiddo. You win this battle.
We did a jungle hike and slid down waterfalls. We ate amazing food from local food stands, and mediocre food from restaurants in tourist district. We toured the various historical sites and National Parks. We rented an AirBnB efficiency apartment in a local (not the tourist area) district, one of a dozen apartments in a building, mostly occupied by locals. We talked to our neighbors (who were thrilled to see children learning and appreciating their culture, food, and language. We fed stray cats. We fed stray chickens. We fed pigeons. As the sign in the apartment explained: “Welcome to Puerto Rico. Sometimes the power goes out. Sometimes the water goes out. Sometimes the water is cold. Here we go with the flow. Welcome to Island Life.” We learned to go with the flow.
While in Florida, we stayed and visited with family, hunted for fossils and shark teeth in the Peace River, walked some back road looking for shark teeth, visited multiple museums and parks (Devils Hopper was a favorite), and even checked out a “bin store” on it’s discount day.
Our second major loop took us from Florida to Denver then to NW Arkansas where we stopped and visited Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. We dug for quartz crystals in the mines in Arkansas (highly recommend), searched for diamonds in the Crater of [no] Diamonds (meh), and hiked uphill 2 miles to see the Crystal Vista (kids give hikes in 105* a big thumbs down). We checked out homesteaders’ homes and what it was like in Oklahoma when it was a territory (a very whitewashed version, which is a story for another day). We saw a lot of poverty in Oklahoma too – something I was not quite expecting – the kids noticed it too, and asked how and why this could happen in our country. In Kansas, we traveled along Route 66 and visited the town of Galena, very much the town ‘Cars’ was based on. Cool town. Though, sad to see what rural Route 66 towns have turned into – ghost towns and relics of a bygone era. In Missouri, we stayed in Joplin, saw the old buildings along the Arkansas River, saw street cars, visited their museum, and more. Outside of Joplin, (in the literal middle of nowhere), we found a hamburger stand and petting zoo (complete with a narrow gauge railway). Kids love it.
We also stopped at the home of George Washington Carver and his national monument, located in a rural area on the Missouri/Arkansas border. We arrived to this plantation, learning that it was actually his slave owner’s plantation, as he was born into slavery. They had a video starting when we arrived, so we rushed in to watch that — and I did not properly prep the kids for what they were about to see and hear. In a short 25 minute video, they learned about ‘klu-kluxing’ – the act of kidnapping slaves and bringing them across state borders for resale as slaves. They learned about lynching, segregated schools, discrimination, hangings, vigilante justice, and all sorts of the dark sides of being black in America during Carver’s life (roughly 1860’s-1945). My daughter was overwhelmed. My son had many questions: “you tell us to look for the helpers when bad things happen – where were the helpers at?”, “why didn’t the police stop the lynching?”, “why would people treat others like that?”, “why didn’t the meanness affect him?”. And more. So many questions.
Carver was a scientist who truly revolutionized farming for sharecroppers and helped many through his teaching at Tuskegee. He was a man ahead of his time, and underappreciated and under-respected during his time on Earth. Even now, months after our visit, questions sometimes bubble up from both of them. They are still wrapping their minds around concepts of racism and discrimination and the things they saw in the video. I know that because of their experiences, they will be and become more compassionate, thoughtful, empathetic, justice-seeking individuals.
So, the question — would we do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat. In fact, we have re-upped to the yearlong “Go Wild” All you can fly airpasses for all of 2024. We have already started a “my” google maps setting up the pin points of places we want to visit in the Summer of ’24. Spoilers: The big states with lots of pins — Montana, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, – with lesser pins being Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, and the USVI. If you have any rock hounding, museum, hiking, back country camping, or other advice of must-do’s for these places, please let me know!