The first day of school was drawing near for Lynn Gilbertsen, a high school English teacher, and her husband, Joe Troutman, who teaches elementary school art.
COVID-19 had kept them close to their North Side home all summer, hunkered down with their 6-year-old son, Max, and 3-year-old daughter, Beth. Gilbertsen made a giant world map out of felt and foam to keep their worldviews expansive, even as their ability to travel and explore the actual world contracted.
They checked out geography books from the library. The kids loved learning each country’s flag, learning which countries had volcanoes, learning how many countries make up Africa, learning which products are exported from which countries.
Gilbertsen logged a lot of hours on Google, which made her teacher heart happy. But she longed for a way to bring some of the lessons alive before summer ended and they were all tethered to screens for hours and days on end.
“I’m trying to show my kids that learning can be something you can go do,” said Gilbertsen, who teaches at Oak Park and River Forest High School. “It’s not just somebody opening your brain and dumping a bunch of information into it and then you’ve learned.”
She started researching places to visit within an hour of Chicago that would replicate world travel. Turns out there are a bunch.
The Eiffel Tower at hole 13 of Skokie Sports Park’s miniature golf course.
The Leaning Tower of Niles, a half-size replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa — added to the National Register of Historic Places last year, if you didn’t know.
The Fischer Windmill inside Mount Emblem Cemetery in Elmhurst, which, according to IllinoisWindmills.org, was constructed beginning in 1865 with parts shipped from Holland. The spot it sits upon was farmland back then, and the mill was used to grind wheat and corn.
Each visit became a history lesson.
Gilbertsen started posting photos and descriptions of their trips in a Chicago-area Facebook group for parents. Her Leaning Tower of Niles photo — her family, Italian takeout on a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, a fake Leaning Tower of Pisa — got 1,000 “likes” in an hour.
“People were like, ‘Oh, my gosh! Do you have a curriculum you could share?'” Gilbertsen said. “I’m like, ‘No, I just made this up. It’s Olive Garden.'” (“My kids’ favorite, nonauthentic Italian food,” she confided.) They got gelato at Ix-Chel in Jefferson Park afterward.
The trips started Aug. 15. They’ve averaged one a day since then.
They pulled the kids around Pilsen in a wagon, taking in hand-painted murals and searching for images of the heroes in Mexico’s fight for independence from Spain.
They went to Chinatown and searched for pagodas.
They went to Wadsworth and stood outside what remains of the Gold Pyramid House, a six-story private residence built in 1977, complete with a moat and 55-foot-tall statue of Ramses II, that suffered millions of dollars in damages during a fire in 2018.
Gilbertsen Googled “Egyptian revivalist architecture” and discovered Reebie Storage and Moving on Clark Street, built in 1922 and fashioned after an Egyptian temple.
They stopped for Egyptian food afterward at Cairo Kebob near DePaul University and met a college student from Egypt working the register. She introduced them to koshary, a mixture of lentils, chickpeas, macaroni noodles and tomato sauce.
A huge part of travel, Gilbertsen said, is learning to taste and respect and revere a new set of customs, a rich history, an unfamiliar menu.
“I wanted my kids to walk and look and try things that aren’t the same as home,” she said. “That’s the whole point.”
It’s not the same, of course, as immersing themselves in the real places. But it will do for now.
“We haven’t seen India just because we went to Devon Avenue and visited a temple that was Hindu,” Gilbertsen said. “But we saw a slice of Indian culture.”
They talked about India’s religious diversity.
“My kids aren’t experts in Hinduism now,” she said. “But I think they know more about Hinduism and care more about Hinduism now. I think they care more about French people after learning about France. When we travel, I feel like it grows our level of empathy, and that’s something I think the world needs more of.”
She’s hoping to keep the day trips going, even though she and her husband are back in school now and her son starts first grade on Sept. 8. The trips are keeping them connected to the history and diversity in the communities all around them. She wants to turn the photos into a book for her kids to page through for months and years to come.
I love their trips for all the reasons Gilbertsen does: the learning, the novelty, the empathy. But also because they’re one more example of resourcefulness in the face of coronavirus restrictions, and a steadfast refusal to let physical distance be a barrier to our shared humanity.
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