I guess one thing that the pandemic has reminded me of is how to travel small. I very much miss all the big trips that I haven't taken, especially the missed opportunities to travel with my kids while I still have them, but these tiny travels make memories, too, and are very easily done during that one day a week when no kid has ballet or community college class or a horseback riding lesson or work or volunteer obligations.
We've been using the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail as a chance to travel small. Matt plans out one or two stops whenever we've got a completely free day, and I figure out a nearby random tourist activity.
Like Jug Rock! It apparently has its own mascot!
Jug Rock is a freestanding rock formation made of sandstone, and is apparently the tallest of its kind east of the Mississippi:
Clamber all around it so you can work up an appetite, then head over to Bo Mac's Drive-In for ice cream!
I had possibly the most delicious ice cream of my life: a peanut butter crunch blizzard:
Luna seems to have also quite enjoyed the last lick of Will's blueberry blizzard:
Syd, though, chose not just an ice cream but also a "red cream soda," a new-to-her beverage with a charming name and delightful color. I didn't remember ever having tasted red cream soda before, either, so I tasted hers... and found myself suddenly very small, sitting in the Fellowship Hall of Midland Heights United Methodist Church, drinking red cream soda from a bottle while I waited for Mammaw to get out of Bible Study.
Matt loves the ice cream trail so much that the kids and I made him a DIY hamburger trail, with all the best burgers the southern half of Indiana has to offer. After our ice cream breakfast, then, we drove to another small town, picnicked on take-out hamburgers in the park, then did some more small town sightseeing:
Luna hilariously did not know what to think of this giant water wheel:
We walked along the river, found an old-school playground with both a teeter-totter and spring riders, all of which have long been removed from all our local playgrounds.
If only we'd found a metal slide and a merry-go-round, we'd have been in vintage playground heaven!
I was chilling on a metal glider, digesting my hamburger and lazily watching the kids teeter-totter, feeling sleepy and dreading the hike back to the car, when Matt, who always has too much energy, came back from walking further down the river path and told me that there was a cemetery off in the distance.
I got my energy back!
Jasper, this little town with the hamburgers and the water wheel, has a large population of people with German heritage, and so Will and I had a fabulous time wandering around this cemetery overlooking the river and finding all the old headstones written in German:
Afterwards, we walked back to the car, where I declared that this time I really was tired, but THEN we drove by a labyrinth so Syd and I jumped out of the car and walked that, and she found a hat, and then we finally drove home while listening to horror movie retellings on my newest favorite podcast--
--because it's October!
Ice cream for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch, an unusual rock formation, a working water wheel, an old-school playground, an even older cemetery, driving practice for both the teenagers, the unlocking of a core memory, new family memories added to the collection, and home before dark: it was a perfect day of small travel!
Will has been loving the geology unit of the Earth Sciences class she's been taking at our local community college this semester, and one day recently it inspired us to drag out our HUGE collection of rocks, fossils, and shells to admire.
Will has always been interested in rocks and fossils, in particular, and we've collected them together as long as we've been homeschooling, but rarely have we had the attention span to really sit down to clean, organize, identify, and display them. Oops!
Fortunately, our current mania has lasted long enough for us to get the entire collection organized, much of it loosely identified, and our favorites set aside for display. We've been filling up several Riker mounts that I bought way back in 2015 (so I'm also stoked to have a good chunk of closet space freed up!), and are DIYing display cases for our larger specimens.
I have one entire Riker mount reserved solely for my favorite finds from our two family trips to Penn Dixie in 2010 and 2018. I spent an episode of Double Love carefully cleaning them in the bathroom sink with an old toothbrush, and once they were all spiffed up and pretty, I took their pictures!
This is my favorite specimen. It's part of a trilobite's cephalon!
Here's an excellent horn coral.
I think this is part of a trilobite's axis?
Check out my crinoid crown! I am so proud of this fossil because I own zillions of crinoid stem fossils from hunting here in Indiana, but this is one of my only crowns.
I've got almost the entire trilobite in this fossil mold!
Here are some crinoid stems to go with my crown!
I really like the combination of the trilobite and brachiopod fossils here.
I think this is a Bryzoan!
I love my trilobite faces.
Here's my finished Penn Dixie Riker mount:
I've got a handful of fossils that I want to keep but not display (so much for reclaiming ALL that closet space!), a couple of matrices that I want to investigate further, and a few fossils that I might try putting in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop to see if the same people who are interested in rainbow candles and mathematical quilts might also be interested in fossils.
And if Will and I are planning our list of colleges to visit around nearby sites for rock and fossil collecting, that's nobody's business but the homeschoolers'!
Our in-person explorations this summer were supposed to be the Western Caribbean with our Girl Scout troop, southern Alabama and Louisiana with our family, and several assorted camping trips and weekend adventures with just me and the girls.
Honestly, though, at this point I'm so tired of complaining about the pandemic that I don't even feel like complaining about it. We're together at home, safe and sound, making our own fun more or less.
And instead of real travel on a cruise ship with lots of friends, exploring Mayan architecture, taking young people to get soft serve and pizza at 3:00 am just because we can, the four of us are eating popsicles at home and I'm only up at 3:00 am every day because a mockingbird lives right outside my bedroom window.
Whatever. It is what it is.
It's been several years since we took our family trip to Yellowstone National Park, and so when Yellowstone kindly announced that it would allow children to earn its normally park-only Junior Ranger badge at home, I decided that it was the perfect chance to make our own fun and I turned it into a unit study.
The study broadly follows the Yellowstone National Park Junior Ranger badge book, which at least right now Yellowstone is still offering on their site, still with the possibility to earn the Junior Ranger badge from home. The subheadings for this study match the activity titles for the Junior Ranger book, although you could complete this study without referencing it.
SUPERVOLCANO
Naked Science: Supervolcanoes is a terrific documentary about the Yellowstone supervolcano, although it scared the snot out of Syd and I have somehow managed to inform everyone that I have seen in person since we watched it (being that we watched it about 6 weeks ago, that number amounts to Matt, two socially-distanced friends, and the physical therapist helping me with my rotator cuff tendinitis) of exactly how long we in Indiana can expect to live after it erupts, and what we can expect to die of.
The documentary speaks quite a bit about calderas (there's a great Jurassic Park moment in which the scientists are frustrated because they know there *should* be a caldera at Yellowstone but they just can't find it, and then one of them is flying over the park in a helicopter and realizes that they haven't been able to see it because they've been IN it--it's that large!), and so this DIY caldera project makes a great hands-on activity to accompany it.
HYDROTHERMAL FEATURES
It's a shame that we're not really at Yellowstone, because these were the sights that I enjoyed most when I've gone! Here are a couple of decent virtual tours of various hydrothermal features at Yellowstone, and here's a fun little PBS documentary entitled Yellowstone and Their Steaming Acid Pools of Death:
It's an apropos title!
It's very easy to model hot springs and fumaroles, at least--here's a handy tutorial, as well as a list of hydrothermal features and good definitions for them. I had the kids memorize the types of hydrothermal features, but our modeling didn't go quite as well. The hot spring and fumarole were fine, of course, but my idea that perhaps the kids could engineer a way to DIY a stovetop geyser (got to practice those STEM skills, don't you know?), was unsuccessful:
Well, at least we now know a good half-dozen ways NOT to make a stovetop geyser, so that's something!
Will was interested in the difference between a fountain geyser and a cone geyser, so we found videos that illustrate each one. Here's a fountain geyser:
And here's a cone geyser!
RECIPE FOR A GEYSER
The kids and I had a LOT of fun with this lesson. Geysers are a great subject for a YouTube rabbit trail!
We started off simply trying to find a YouTube video that had a model or demonstration of how a geyser works, but got interested in this video about Yellowstone's largest and just about most sporadic geyser, Steamboat:
This got us looking for other videos of Steamboat Geyser erupting, and we found this great video from a YouTuber named David Schwartz, with lots of angles and good captions:
It was such an interesting video that we checked out his profile to see if he had filmed any other geysers.
He had!
Clearly, someone who has filmed several geyser eruptions must be interesting, so we Google stalked him.
And that's how we learned the term GEYSER GAZER! That's what you call people who've made watching/studying geysers into a hobby!
You know what else we found while cyberstalking this random person?
It was not great. The kids were beside themselves with how hokey and unfunny it was, in the many lulls I read out loud to them all about Garrison Keillor's history as a workplace sex criminal, and as if we didn't already loathe our listening experience enough, when it came time for David Schwartz's big moment, he got to speak approximately half a line, then Keillor cut him off, made a joke that felt like it was at least partially at his expense (I don't totally remember, and I am NOT going back to listen to it again), and then moved on to something else!
We were livid. Syd had to be talked down from violence. She loves David Schwartz the MOST, and did NOT appreciate some hokey sex criminal denying our favorite geyser gazer his public radio glory.
I did tell you that we make our own fun, right? Ahem.
Since the kids loved studying geysers so much, I gave them the assignment to draw one. They had to find a good geyser eruption video on YouTube, pause it at an appropriate point, and then create a piece of art showing their geyser mid-eruption, making sure to include elements of background and foreground, realistic or creative. And, of course, they had to credit the video's creator, because we don't deny people their glory in our homeschool!
Here's Syd's creation:
LIVING COLORS
This lesson was a great place to add a little more academic rigor for my older students. Yellowstone has an absolutely terrific lesson on thermophiles, and learning about chemosynthesis means that you get a chance both to review photosynthesis AND compare it to a completely different metabolic process!
For a little bit more challenge, I had the kids research and label the possible name of each thermophile represented in the thermophile coloring page in their Junior Ranger books. Everybody likes to color!
I had only intended our Yellowstone study to take up our afternoon project time for one week, and we spent soooooo long on geysers that we skimped quite a bit on the rest of the unit. Here's what we did:
We watched BBC's Yellowstone: Episode 1 and discussed how the presence or absence of wolves would change Yellowstone's ecosystem.
BEAR COUNTRY
We watched Grizzly Cauldron: The Giant Bears of Yellowstone. If you've got older kids who love animals, there's an interesting jumping off point here for another rabbit trail. You can find amateur YouTube videos of people inappropriately reacting to bear encounters in national parks, or read accounts of bear encounters (remember that time that I told you ALL ABOUT all the ways people get killed by bears in Yellowstone?), or watch additional documentaries, like Grizzly Man. There's a lot to study on the topic of animal encounters, especially through the lens of environmental science, psychology, outdoor survival, or animal welfare.
Is your library opened back up again? Ours has curbside check-out of online holds! If/when your library is back in business, here are our favorite library resources on Yellowstone:
