Literary Connections

While on our Christmas car trip, we visited many places that we'd never been before, as well as locales I hadn't seen in a long time.

It was exciting to travel through Wyoming again, where we used to visit my grandparents before they moved to Arizona. I was slightly disappointed to not see the herds of Antelope that I remembered, but we did see a few groups of ranch Buffalo.

We were especially interested as we journeyed into Colorado, as it is one of the states where we might move when Joseph is done with school. What we saw wasn't the beautiful mountains and forests I expected, but at our motel we picked up a Colorado magazine, and discovered that we were (sadly) driving through the less scenic part of the state. It was good to know so that we can know what we'd be getting into, depending on what part of the state we might eventually move to. Maybe.

Kansas was, to me, stark and barren. There wasn't much snow, but it was bare and super windy; we drove in constant fear that we'd be blown into passing semis. From what I saw, I realized this was a state where I certainly don't want to live any time soon. When we stopped at a restaurant for lunch, we were pleasantly surprised by the people. The place was full of blue-collar workers, maybe men from a construction site or some kind of road work site nearby. Elora was being especially saucy, running around and not eating her lunch.

I expected the diners there to be annoyed and to give us dirty looks, but they were actually smiling at her and Joshua, occasionally chuckling at their antics. It was quite a refreshing response from these gruff looking men.

Oklahoma seemed positively lush after Kansas, as did Texas. One thing I found odd about these states was the difference in Fast Food places from what I was used to. For instance, so many places seemed to use Styrofoam cups and containers. What the heck? I thought those had been eliminated all over the country. Don't they care about the environment?

We ate at a Dairy Queen in Eastern Texas, and the menu was completely different than that in Western states. Instead of "Grill-Burgers" all of the burger offerings had the suffix of "Buster". And everything came with gravy, either for dipping or directly on the meat. You could also get batter-fried Jalipenos, referred to as "Jalitos". Very interesting.

One thing that was fun to see was Elora's observations of all these new parts of the world. It was amazing to see how easily she was able to draw upon the books we read her everyday to aid in her understanding of things. It all started before we left our house.

We explained that our first night of travel would be spent in a Motel. Before I even started to expound on what that was, she said, "Oh, like in my Sleep Book!"(Dr. Seuss). She understood completely about everyone parking outside and sleeping in the beds for the night, and she was so excited to go to a motel after that.

Several times on our journey, we passed scenes like this:


The very first time we passed some smokestacks, Elora exclaimed, "Look mom, just like in The Lorax!(Dr. Seuss) They're making smog in the sky!" Wow, who knew we were teaching our daughter to be so world conscious?


The connections between the literary world and the road continued on through our trip. When we were driving slowly in the rush hour traffic of Oklahoma City, we told Elora that there were lots of cars all going the same way, thus making us drive slower. "Oh!" she said with perfect understanding, "Just like on the "Zayt Highway Eight!" (Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are, Dr. Seuss)

One time, Elora and Josh were sticky while eating something in the car, so we gave them baby wipes to clean up with. Elora asked why we were using those instead of napkins. I told her it was just like in her Curious George book, when George tried to clean the Maple syrup off with napkins, they all stuck to him, so that's why we have to use baby wipes. She totally understood after that. (Curious George Makes Pancakes , Margret and H.A. Rey)

Even after we got home, I was amazed as she found more parallels. She asked me to read the tag on one of her toys, and I told her it said, "Made in China."
She said, "China? Hey, just like in Mulan!" True, that could be from the movie, but we don't own it and we do have a book all about the Disney Princesses.

I know there were many other instances that I didn't write down, but I was glad to see our daughter was well on her way to understanding all the problems of the world because of her reading habit. I'm sure she'll win the Nobel Peace Prize someday.