It’s not quite spring, and it’s not quite winter, so now is a good time for families to plan summer road trips.
One of the best my family has taken is the Circle Tour of Lake Superior, which may seem like a marathon at 1,754 miles, but actually was perfectly suited to children: There’s something interesting to check out about every half hour.
Start in Duluth and head up the North Shore, stopping at the re-created fur posts in Grand Portage and, in Thunder Bay, at Old Fort William. Stop to kayak among the islands off Rossport, and see the statue of Winnie the Pooh in White River, the real-life bear’s hometown.
See the pictographs of Agawa Rock, the locks of Sault St. Marie and the Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, off “the graveyard of the Great Lakes.” Climb the 300-foot-tall Grand Sable Dunes near Michigan’s Grand Marais, and take a boat from Munising to see Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Wind up the Keweenaw Peninsula and around to Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, and finish at Bayfield.
To plan the trip — two weeks are about right — get a copy of Lake Superior magazine’s annual travel guide, $6.95, which can be ordered at 888-244-5253. For just the map, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Lake Superior magazine, P.O. Box 16417, Duluth, MN 55816-0417, and get tourism materials from Duluth at 800-438-5884.
A tour of the Black Hills is a must-do for people from all over the nation; children especially love clambering over the granite Needles and petting the junk-food-loving wild burros. If you like to hike and watch wildlife — bison, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and prairie dogs are all over the park — Custer State Park is the place to stay; call 800-658-3530 for cabins and lodge rooms and 800-710-2267 for campsites; www.state.sd.us/sdparks.
If you like such attractions as gold-panning, train excursions, trail rides and balloon flights, or you want to be closer to Mount Rushmore, there are many motels (with pools!) in nearby Custer, Hill City and Keystone; call 800-732-5682 for a South Dakota Vacation Guide; www.state.sd.us/tourism.
Eighty miles east of the Black Hills, the alien peaks, gullies and buttes of Badlands National Park fascinate children, especially those who are fans of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.” Cedar Pass Lodge, 605-433-5460, is the only place to stay in the park, though nearby Kadoka has some nice motels. For information on the park itself, call 605-433-5361 or check the Web site at www.nps.gov/badl.
Another trip west through the prairie will feed the imaginations of young boys and girls who learned about frontier life through the children’s classics “Little House on the Prairie,” “On the Banks of Plum Creek” and other books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. A good time to do it is in late June and July, when Laura Ingalls Wilder pageants are staged in Walnut Grove, Minn., on the banks of the real Plum Creek, and in DeSmet, S.D., on the shores of the real Silver Lake.
The pageant in DeSmet, where Laura’s houses can be toured, will be held June 30-July 2 and July 7-9 and 14-16; no advance tickets are sold, but no one is turned away. Call 800-880-3383 for tourism information. The Walnut Grove pageant, which has lots of cool special effects, will be held July 7-9, 14-16 and 21-23, with a Pioneer Festival also held on the grounds July 15-16 and 22-23. Order tickets and tourism information by calling 888-859-3102; www.walnutgrove.org.
If you want to complete the tour — and thousands do — there also are homes and/or museums in Pepin, Wis., 715-442-3011; Independence, Kan., 800-882-3606; Burr Oak, Iowa, 319-735-5916 or 800-463-4692 (Decorah); and Mansfield, Mo., which will stage the outdoor musical pageant “Little House Memories” Aug. 25-26 and Sept. 1-2, 8-9 and 15-16; the Laura Ingalls Wilder Festival will be Sept. 2. Call 417-924-3626; www.bestoftheozarks.com/wilderhome.
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway Information Center in Menomonie, Wis., sends out a guidebook about the sites; call 800-283-1862.
