I’m a big believer in doing weird things to break up the monotony.
It’s especially effective in families with young kids, who get bored even when given access to 72 LEGO sets, 10,000 dried out Crayola markers (seriously, where do the caps go?) and countless episodes of Peppa Pig.
So my husband had one day off this week. I had read that an artist built a replica of Stonehenge just a few hours away, and although I’d rather travel to England, we piled in the van on a whim to go check it out.
(Side note: the van is an Odyssey, so we named it Homer.)
Well, our odyssey was nearly as odd as that one. “Bamahenge,” as it is known, is not a tourist attraction, per se, but rather a series of strange sculptures tucked into clearings in the woods along a nondescript highway.
You can’t plug it into Google maps. Actually, you can, but you still end up getting a bit lost. It’s almost better that way, because you drive right past the fiberglass monoliths only to come upon a fiberglass stegosaurus and triceratops.
So you’re just kind of marveling at those guys while a few other cars stop, presumably at random, because they’ve spotted a dinosaur on the side of the road. They ask you what this is all about, and you suddenly feel like a bit of an expert, because you’ve seen the T-Rex and you know about the Lady in the Lake, which they’ve never heard of.
And then a nice lady with a much nicer camera than your iPhone asks if you’d like to have your picture taken with the King of the Dinosaurs, and she takes the time to edit it and email it to you a few hours later. (Which is a lesson about the kindness of strangers, and how it actually does still exist, even in the most unusual of places.)
In the end, we drove an hour away from home on a summer’s day instead of playing video games or going to the beach – and it was weird and it was hot but it was fun, and I bet the kids will remember it and laugh. (Or wonder what the heck we were thinking.)
I know I will.
Always up for an adventure,
Ashley
flightymom.com 