In Praise of Family Road Trips” October 2026
“America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates(Stanza One)
“Oh beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majestiesAbove the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhoodFrom sea to shining sea!”
This Article is a paean to four very beautiful things: the month of October; the breadth and beauty of our nation’s geography; the historical significance of the people who have lived in every corner of our land; and the incomparable joys of road-tripping through these landscapes with our precious families.
The inspiration for this Article is the Road Trip that my husband and I just took through the States of North and South Dakota and Wyoming, in celebration of our 42nd wedding anniversary on October 6.
The weather could not more gloriously have reflected the reasons we chose October as our wedding month in the first place. Everywhere we went in South Dakota, we basked in the warmth of Indian summer and gazed at cerulean blue skies, burnished golden leaves, and rugged rocky hills. We encountered wildlife in abundance: free-ranging buffalo, wandering prong-horn antelope, shade-resting big-horn sheep, creek-wading mountain goats, and sentinel-standing prairie dogs on guard at the gates of their enormous “towns.”
We visited the glorious Custer State Park, the inspiring Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, the moving Crazy Horse Memorial, the kitschy Wall Drug Store, the other-worldly Badlands National Park, the historic Old West town of Deadwood, and the lovely Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway. We learned about more of the life of George Armstrong Custer than just his tragic “Last Stand.” We met some of the great men and heroes of the Lakota Sioux beneath the cliff-carved statue of Chief Crazy Horse, a work in continuing progress that already dwarfs the Presidential carvings on Mt. Rushmore. We brushed shoulders with the shades of Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp in the historic precincts of Deadwood. We stood amazed at the ingenuity of early ranchers in the Badlands who managed to harvest hay for their livestock on the tops of plateaus that their cattle never could have climbed. And we grasped a little bit of the hardscrabble lives of the Depression-era citizens of Wall, who dared to buy a drugstore in the middle of nowhere and turned it into a going concern with their inspired notion of handing out free ice water to passersby on the dusty roads.
When we ventured up into North Dakota, we had a very different but equally wonderful experience in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The weather turned colder and damper, and the sky was often overcast. But there, too, we encountered monumental landscapes of desolate beauty in the earth-tone striations of conical hills uniformly topped with brick-red rock, and learned that those fiery summits were the work of subterranean coal seams that had spontaneously combusted at some point in time and burned on for years, super-heating the rock layers above until they crimsoned and hardened into a substance called “clinker.” We bundled up to withstand the chilly wind and walked out on heights that provided far-reaching views in both directions of the oxbow curve of the Little Missouri River below. And we dallied for hours in the unique living-history museum that is the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in the town of Medora.
When we headed south into Wyoming, setting a course for home in Colorado, the landscape changed yet again; and this time we gazed and gaped at the pillared monolith of Devil’s Tower, managing (by the grace of God) to propel our orthopedically challenged bodies around the entire 1.6 mile Loop Trail that circumnavigates the Tower’s base. A particularly fascinating aspect of that hike was the presence of many trees that have been festooned with colorful ribbons, cloth flags, and small bags that are believed to contain or embody the prayers of Native Americans who have affixed them to the branches. Visitors are stringently warned not to approach or touch these objects for fear of emptying them of their spiritual power.
And all along the way—over some 1,100 miles in total—we were blessed to drive and look, to point and exclaim, to stop for “just one more photo,” or simply to sail along in silence, companionably absorbing a relatively small portion of a country whose length and breadth and variety seem to defy description. It became clear to me just how much the character of our land has shaped the character of our people. This is America, our country; these with whom we travel it are our families; and these our children are the inheritors of an incalculable bounty bestowed on us by the hand of God our Creator.
May we bless our children with plenteous opportunity to travel the highways and the back roads of America together with us—that we may all come to know and love both our land and our Creator the better for our journeying!