Children's Book Week: Westward Ho!

My love of travel was cemented during a 6-week Odyssey of Awesome my parents took us on when I was nine. We set off at dusk from Bloomington and made a great loop around the western U.S. My brother Dwayne turned six in Rocky Mountain National Park. After that, we saw Four Corners, 120-degree days in the Arizona desert, giant sequoias in California, the Cascades in Washington, and Yellowstone geysers.

I was hooked.

But the travel bug showed up before that, not long after I began reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. (They influenced my writing, too, but more about that on Monday.) What struck me as a kid were the places she described: the Big Woods of Wisconsin; a dugout house on a creek in Minnesota; a town in South Dakota that saw seven months of winter in a succession of blizzards; and (of course) wide, open prairie in Kansas.

We had woods and creeks and snow in Indiana, but Wilder's descriptions caught my imagination. They made me want to see the places she wrote about. When we set out for our West trip, we rode in a Chinook camper -- Mom and Dad in the front seats, and Dwayne and I up in the loft bed. Weeks of adventure and new places and no school lay ahead. It was pretty easy to imagine we traveled in a covered wagon.

Do you love to travel? What books did you read that fanned the travel flame?