HaveKidsWillTravel

We used HomeExchange.com to look for the opportunity of a home exchange in Chicago, and were able to offer a non-simultaneous swap for our holiday home (which makes timing things a bit easier) and were lucky enough to be offered a cool old coach-house for a week in Ukrainian village – a great introduction to Chicago life in a lively downtown neighbourhood.

This gave us a bit of time to recover from a hard week of cross-country travel, find our feet in Chicago and figure out a plan of attack for the daunting task of settling into life in a big city. Next step was a furnished apartment for a month – just long enough to see if I could find work, a good area for the kids to go to school, an apartment to sign a lease on, and kick the tires of Chicago as a place to settle in for season or two.

And Chicago really is one of the great cities of the world – in a laid back, relaxed mid-west kind of a way. Unlike most US cities, it’s a city of neighbourhoods with a real urban center – great architecture, museums, parks, and a big city bustle without the hustle of somewhere like New York.

And if we’re going to live in a big city, we want to live in the city – a downtown neighbourhood somwhere on the ‘L’ train, walking distance to everything, rather than out in the endless suburban sprawl where everything involves a drive somewhere. And there are some great sounding public schools on the inner North side, funky old 1920s apartments and vibrant neighbourhoods.

We got out to one of the last Cubs games of the season at Wrigley field, the Field Museum, some of the big parks and gardens, and drove around the lake to the Michigan sand dunes (apparently a good surf spot in the right conditions!) – and by the end of the month, had convinced ourselves that a year in Chicago would be great fun.

The job-hunt, though, turned out to be a little more fraught – and we got down to literally the last few hours before having to book our onward journey when I got confirmation that yes, actually, there was a job to keep us here.

And so the next stage of our adventure begins!

And a long way listening to local radio stations (all country music, religion, or both – “here’s a little number we call ‘Atheists don’t have no songs’“…) So we pillaged Steve’s music collection, and loaded the iPod with a soundtrack for the backroads across middle America – Elvis, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan. Its funny how kids will take to old classics from the first moment they hear them – and who needs Wiggles when you’ve got “Grandma’s Featherbed” and “A Boy Named Sue”?

As soon as we were out of the foothills of the rockies, the landscape flattened out. We drove NorthEast across Colorado, into Nebraska. Storms blew up from the East as the afternoon wore on into evening, but none of the State Parks on the map seemed to actually exist on the ground, so with dark falling and a howling wind blowing, we stopped in a small town steakhouse for a meal. We asked if there where the nearest campground was, the waitress looked puzzled, conferred with the cook, who rang her father, a town councillor, and got back to us with an answer – “You can camp in the park by town hall – it’s ok, the Sherriff is off duty tonight”. We drove on…

We found a state park at the edge of South Dakota close to midnight, folded the back seats flat for Fiona and the kids to stretch out, and I laid a sleepmat and sleeping bag across the hood of the car – warm and comfortable till the mosquitoes found me, and I put up the tent, cursing in the dark.

Next morning we got an early start and headed to Wind Cave national park for a morning tour of the caverns deep down under the Black Hill limestone, roaming narrow twisting passages through just a small section of one of the largest cave systems on earth.

And then we drove on through Custer state park to Mt Rushmore for an iconic American moment. It might seem a little kitsch, a little uncool, but standing there, right in in front of it in real life, you can’t help but gawp in awe at the scale and audacity of the thing. The kids were all suitably impressed.

And onto the South Dakota badlands for sunset, with gusts whipping as we cooked and tried to put up the tent, cursing in the wind.

After the Black Hills and badlands, we were back out onto prairie. We stopped at the Mitchell Corn Palace – just to find out what a Corn Palace was (the city hall festooned with corn cob murals, an annual tradition since the 1880′s).

We made it to the childhood farm and home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House on the Prairie” books, to camp for the night in a field looking out across cornfields and Laura’s old schoolhouse and chapel. We had the place to ourselves, and the host pointed out the bathrooms, woodpile, and the underground tornado shelter – seeing our startled looks, she pointed at the clear skies and reassured us “don’t worry, you won’t need it this time of year”.

We woke to steady rain on the tent, thunder rumbling in the distance. The wind picked up and lightning flashed as we lay in bed waiting for it to pass over. Peering out the window of the tent, a big greeny-black V-shaped cloud loomed over the cornfields. Suddenly, the storm-shelter sounded like a good place to be, but with the lightning flashing and thunder building to a near constant rumble, a 50-meter dash across an open field didn’t seem like such a good idea.

The rain hammered down, the wind strengthened. We huddled together as the tent pegs all came out of the ground and the tent flapped – if we made a dash, the tent and everything in it would blow away into the corn – we were going to have to sit out whatever was coming our way right where we were. I half expected to see cows, houses, girls in ruby slippers blowing past as the wind built to a roar. Suddenly the tent poles bent, flattening the tent over our faces, water poured through and under, drenching us in moments, the noise of the storm drowning the hysterical chorus of 5 voices “AAAAAAAAH!”

Now Its hard to say how long it lasted, but gradually things eased enough for us to make a dash through the blasting wind and rain for the storm shelter, where we huddled in our sopping pyjamas, still only half-believing the intensity of the storm we’d just been through.

And Evie – enjoying the restorative warmth of a hot shower – pipes up (only half joking) – ‘now that was cool, Dad, can we do that again?‘

And now a week later, we were just about feeling human again. They have a beautiful home, an hour out of Denver in the start of the Rockies, looking across 40mile of forest and mountains to Pikes Peak – but for folks as unacclimatised to the altitude as we were on arrival, just walking up the stairs was enough to warrant an afternoon nap.

Starting to get used to the altitude, we’d at last ventured out for a bit of local exploring, a bike ride and a daytrip up to the mountains – a drive across a high pass, where looking up and seeing 14,000 foot peaks looking so tantalisingly close, a plan was hatched – an early morning ascent of one of the “easiest and best beginner” 14ers in the Rockies – Mt Bierstadt, a 3.5mile trail and 2,400ft vertical ascent. (supposedly…)

And so Evie, Angus, Steve, Lilly and myself set off at dawn – for the drive up to the pass, and then hit the trail. Sure enough, it didn’t take long to realise that everything in the mountains is a bit further than it looks from the bottom – the alpine environment gives you little to judge perspective from, and that short jog we’d anticipated up the mountain started to unfold into an epic ascent.

The trail started down across a creek and some marsh, where we passed a Moose breakfasting on weeds in a small tarn, before it wound its way up the mountain. Slogging up the trail nearly an hour after we’d set out, it was just a little disheartening to look back and realise that we were only about the same elevation as where we started.

We carried on, up past the last of the willow bush, with the flowers and vegetation changing every few hundred meters as the trail steepened. The good trail started to turn to rubble and scree, and Lilly decided she had had enough in the backpack, so Steve turned around and started on the long walk back. Looking up, I could have sworn we were only a few hundred meters from the ridge, so Angus, Evie and I carried on.

All of a sudden, Evie started to run out of enthusiasm. A little cajoling would get her another 50meters at a time before needing to rest again, and she was starting to sport a bit of a dizzy smile. The summit still looked a fair slog, but the ridge didn’t look too far away – a nice spot to stop and have our lunch before heading back. Angus was doing OK, but we passed another Father and son hiking with the poor lad (maybe about 8yo) hunched over a rock bawling. We swapped a few words of encouragement, and Evie made it another 50meters. I was feeling the altitude myself, and figured we had just about hit our limit.

We inched the last hundred yards up to the ridge (with a bit of piggybacking along the way), and had our lunch enjoying the panorama out over the Eastern cliffs. By the topo map, I reckoned it was only about 250 vertical feet shy of the summit, but a long way at the rate we were moving. Starting down, we passed another Dad, coaxing a 10yo son up the trail who really seemed to be having some trouble – curled up and acting pretty unresponsive – yet Dad shrugged off suggestions of altitude sickness, seeming determined they carry on and up.

As soon as we started down, Evie perked up and started actually skipping down the trail. Angus, on the other-hand, who to that point had been keen to press on to the summit, took just one look back at how far away the carpark was, and nearly burst into tears.

A life lesson in mountain climbing – even if you make it there, you’ve still got to get back down again…