Taking local road trips with kids is a great way to teach your children about the history and beauty of your home state. You don’t have to go far to find fun new campgrounds, forests, monuments, museums, diners, shops and hikes. Today, I’m really excited to share a post all about one family’s adventures on a Central Washington road trip and camping trip with kids. Evangeline Dittman – writer, photographer and Seattle mom of two – is here sharing the good, the bad, and the bizarre of her family’s most recent camping trip. Evangeline has the most amazing way with words -she’s the perfect mix of hilarious and humble – guaranteed to make you fall in love with her and their adventure. Ready to hit the road?!
Spring break tradition
Our family has a tradition of traveling over spring break. We live in Seattle, where winters are gray and drizzly. By the time April rolls around, we’re starved for sunlight. Last year, instead of our usual trip to Somewhere Sunny, we decided to stay more local and spend our spring break camping. We had just bought a travel trailer and were feeling bold. That trip has gone down in our family’s annals as the “Mud Camping Trip.” I now have enough distance on the experience to be able to speak of it without breaking into hives, but I still choose not to dwell on it. This sums it up nicely: We ended up visiting a laundromat during that trip, and the laundromat owner said we were nuts to be camping in that area, at that time of year.
Central Washington road trip
Undaunted by our mud camping misadventure, we decided to camp over this year’s spring break as well. My husband plans most of our family adventures; for this trip, he plotted Central Washington road trip, which is sunnier in spring—and blessedly drier—than is the western half of the state. We started at a state park in Yakima (we’re big fans of state parks!). Then, we wended our way through wine country and hops fields to take up residence at a second state park, this one just south of Moses Lake. Along the way, we hiked a canyon, sampled wines, toured a nuclear reactor, visited a petrified forest, and—yes—played in mud. (Though this time the mud was contained and didn’t necessitate a side trip to the laundromat.)
Yakima
We began our Central Washington road trip in Yakima, Washington. Did you know Yakima, Washington produces nearly 75% of all US hops? Me neither! Yakima’s hops production surpassed Germany’s a few years ago and hasn’t yet given up the lead. Evidently, that’s a big deal to hops connoisseurs. Me, I just think the hops fields are pretty and the beer is tasty.
Yakima greeted us with lush hops fields and pruned vineyards. This put me in the perfect state of mind for family camping. Our campsite at Yakima Sportsman State Park was spacious and verdant, filled with friendly families and overly-friendly leaf bugs. (I had to escort out several dozen that just wouldn’t follow our social cues when we felt tired or needed privacy.)
The kids spent most of their campsite time on their bikes, checking out the lily pond and playground. The trails were wide and flat, but something on them had it in for my son’s bike tires. Husband spent his evenings applying patches, and we eventually had to go into town for a new bike tube.
Hops & wine
We hiked the Cowiche Canyon for our first outing. Offering a variety of short trails with little elevation gain, it’s a great hiking option with kids. We nevertheless chose to tackle the steeper, rockier Winery Trail because…wine. If you make it to the end of the trail, you’re rewarded with crisp rosé wines in air-conditioned tasting rooms.
Or so I assume. We didn’t make it to the end of the trail. My Seattle kids don’t tolerate unrelenting sunshine very well, and the sun was beating down on us that day. What’s more, the Winery Trail offers very little in the way of shade. It does, however, offer plenty of raptor and vulture sightings. The enthusiasm for those was almost enough to propel our kids onward up the hill, but not quite.
It’s just as well. We chased marmots back down the trail, scooted over the more treacherous stretches on our bums, and lay on shaded boulders while we snacked. Added bonus: At the end of the trail, the kids played under a weeping willow’s canopy. My daughter insists it’s a whomping willow while my son prefers to call it a happy willow.
Finding the wineries
Rest assured, we did eventually make it to some tasting rooms. The Bonair Winery features a pond with fish and ducks that the kids can feed while you sip wine. (The tasting-room hosts provide food for the critters!) The VanArnam Vineyards has a sweet old dog that will frolic with the kids while you sip wine. See? The kids can interact with nature while you sip wine: parenting done right.
Toppenish
Another day trip took us to Toppenish, a small city noted for their outdoor murals—over 70 of them—depicting various historical scenes from the region. What does 70+ outdoor murals plus two kids equal? Several hundred rounds of I Spy with My Little Eye.
We hit the famed Miner’s Drive-In restaurant on our way back into Yakima. We were surprised (and a little frightened) to discover they serve burgers as big as your head. Honestly, just order one burger. Get your photo, then cut the burger in half and share it. Ugh, three weeks later and I’m still groaning from that burger. Their shakes are purportedly masterful, but we were too stuffed to try one.
Yakama Nation Museum
We visited the Yakama Nation Museum on our way out of town. The exhibits there are a bit choppy. I needed more background information to make sense of some of the stories presented. Then again, my attention was divided between the exhibits and my antsy kids, so it’s possible all the background one needs is there and I just missed it. Alas, museums and children are ancient and natural enemies. I had to do my part to keep them both safe from each other.
Hanford Site B Reactor
Never let it be said that the Dittmans failed to explore a nearby national park. Turns out, the Hanford Site—home to the world’s first plutonium production reactor; source of the plutonium used in the first nuclear explosion (the Trinity test), as well as in the nuclear bomb that the US detonated over Nagasaki, Japan; and the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States—is now a national park. And we went there.
We did our best to prep the kids for the tour. Husband covered the science of nuclear fission while I attempted to sketch out the history and prevailing fears that led to the Manhattan Project. Imagine doing this in four-minute chunks—the approximate attention span of our youngest—using vocabulary a kindergartener and third-grader could grasp. We mostly failed, of course, but it’s important that we tried, right?
Funny aside: I went into the tour thinking it might be the inspiration for the kids’ upcoming science fair. Maybe my oldest could do a presentation on how nuclear reactors work? In hindsight, I’m laughing my butt off. The tour lasted two hours. Twenty minutes in I knew we wouldn’t be explaining nuclear fission to anyone anytime soon.
The truth about the reactor tour
The tour is very science-heavy and disappointingly light in setting the historical context. It starts with a forty-five-minute bus ride (the kids’ favorite part of the tour—the bus was very plush), during which our tour guide, whom I dubbed Euphemism King, described the geography of the area and what made it suitable for hosting nuclear reactors. He sort of glossed over the fate of the people who were farming that land when the government moved in, just as he glossed over the environmental and social impacts of operating a nuclear reactor. Details about the weapons that Hanford’s plutonium enabled, and the millions of tons/billions of gallons of the resulting radioactive waste that is oh-so-leaky were similarly glossed over. All in all, it was a very glossy tour.
Junior Rangers to the rescue
BUT, they have a junior ranger program! Never let it be said the Dittmans failed to earn a junior ranger badge when within a five-mile radius of one. The requirements for this badge were tough. We had to chase down very persnickety details, but the kids nailed it. My favorite part of the ranger workbook was the fill-in-the-blank prompt: I saw my first _____________ at Hanford. Now, I don’t know how often you hang out in a nuclear reactor, but every square foot of it was pretty stinkin’ new to me. I could have filled in the blank with one hundred things that I was seeing for the first time. The kids, however, were most wowed by the typewriter.
Hanford Site gift shop
There’s a funny little gift shop at the end of the tour. I don’t think it’s affiliated with the Hanford Site, though the owner does have official-looking memorabilia—Manhattan Project pins and patches, informational booklets and the like. She also offers a unique assortment of kitsch. The shop gives a kind of 1950s garage-sale vibe. My daughter fell in love with a frankly hideous porcelain keepsake for baby’s first haircut. As it was only three dollars and I had just finished praising her for her patience on the not-so-kid-friendly tour, I bought it for her. Maybe she’ll always remember the atomic bomb when she looks at it?
We chatted a bit with the shop owner and learned that she is descended from the first wave of folks who were recruited to work at Hanford. She graduated Richland High School, whose mascot is the Bomber, usually depicted with a mushroom cloud. A survivor of the Nagasaki bombing who had visited Hanford just last year expressed shock at discovering the mushroom cloud proudly painted on the school’s hallway floor. The shop owner mentioned the visit and politely, but firmly, defended the mascot and logo as a critical emblem of the town’s history.
A little too behind the scenes
When we didn’t cringe or argue (mostly because I was preoccupied with convincing my son we didn’t need the black velvet Elvis painting), she offered to take us to the back of her shop. There, she had a nearly perfect replica of a bedroom from the Hanford Engineer Works Village. This was a 1943 federally sponsored planned community to house Hanford workers and families. I admit to some initial trepidation about following her back there. The shop and the conversation had put me at unease, and the room we stepped into was eerily Stepford Wives-ish. I felt like I was in that scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where Indy wanders into a fake Doom Town minutes before an atomic bomb test. Remember the much-maligned “nuke the fridge” scene? No? Don’t worry about it—just know that the bedroom creeped me out a little.
Once we were safely back in the sunshine, though, I came to appreciate the museum-quality collection the shop owner is cultivating. It’s an important part of the Hanford Site story. If it were put to a vote, I’d tick the box in favor of integrating the shop owner’s eerie room into the overarching tour.
A Hanford Site recap
Here’s the most important thing parents needs to know about visiting the Hanford Site: there are amazing wineries nearby. It’s imperative you make time for them. We visited Col Solare, which offers panoramic vistas, but not a lot of distractions for the kiddos (we read out to them from Harry Potter). Then we dropped by the Hedges estate where walked around the vineyard with glasses in hand, watched some of the workers wrangle chickens into a new coop, laughed at an ornery turkey who looked like he’d been in a few dozen bar fights, quit our jobs, pulled the kids out of school, and moved into a trailer on the estate.
Okay, that last bit isn’t true, but Hedges is the kind of winery that dares you to chuck all your priorities and take up the oenological life.
Potholes State Park
I was apprehensive about bringing our trailer to a park called Potholes. However, it turns out it got its name for the hundreds of tiny islands surrounded by “pothole” lakes that make up the nearby reservoir. And the park offers lush campsites with shorebirds, great horned owls, and long, even groves reminiscent of the manicured lawns Jane Austen’s characters are always walking about, plotting their marital strategies.
Exploring Potholes
We spent our days at Potholes building mud dams along the lakeshore, weaving wreaths from fallen weeping willow twigs, disturbing the fish with our splashing, and—in the evenings—playing a lawn game of our own invention: a blend of soccer, tag, and Game of Thrones (in which we convince Little Sister she not only wants to give the ball back, but giving the ball back is her brilliant idea). Also, the campsites have enough strategically-placed trees to accommodate hammocks, so the kids were able to do their two-headed-burrito thing while Husband and I read and napped.
A couple of birders we met who were familiar with the park told us it gets very busy during the weekends. Sure enough, by Thursday we had quite a few new campsite neighbors. Happily, our nearest neighbors brought kids roughly my kids’ ages, and the four of them hit it off right away. They shared bikes, scooters, bubble wands, marshmallow sticks, and Minecraft stories. (Minecraft stories are interminable, amiright?)
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Just when I’d given up on finding ideas for the kids’ upcoming science fair projects during our travels, we found a petrified forest! The final stop on our Central Washington road trip was Gingko Petrified Forest. This state park hosts a remarkably diverse collection of petrified wood species—we saw petrified spruce, elm, maple, and Douglas fir logs during our hike on the Tree of Stone Trail (which, by the way, is a very gusty and exposed trail; pack water and a sweater!).
We sought refuge from the wind at the Gingko Petrified Forest Museum where we discovered…wait for it…a junior ranger program! The requirements for this badge were fun to fulfill; we watched a short film describing how wood becomes petrified, and then we hunted for fossils hidden throughout the museum. I was especially taken with the display of small, polished bits of petrified wood. The natural markings on the wood, when polished, reveal painterly landscapes and ghostly portraits. (My daughter saw a Harry Potter Dementor in one.)
Petrified forest museum
The museum is also home to ancient petroglyphs which were relocated to the site when rising waters created by the Wanapum Dam threatened to destroy them. My son remarked that whoever made these drawings probably led a happy life; they depict sunny scenes of families and wildlife and gave us a kind of contended feeling—a contentedness that did not diminish even when I saw the signs warning of rattlesnakes. As it happens, the rattlesnakes in this area attack only men—at least according to the sign—so I had no reason to fret.
The deck at the back of the museum provides a lunch spot with an expansive view of the Columbia River, and it’s relatively protected from the wind. If you can time your visit right, take advantage of the beautiful resting spot so you have the energy to check out the Gingko Gem Shop afterwards. It’s just down the road from the museum, and it looks tantalizing to kids. We skipped visiting the shop—we weren’t in the mood for a touristy jaunt just then—but if you need examples of petrified wood for a kid’s science fair project, this is evidently the place to go!
(In the end, my third-grader chose rocketry and the kindergartner chose soap bubbles for their science fair projects.)
About the author
Evangeline is a family photographer and freelance copyeditor in Seattle, Washington. Thanks to her tirelessly adventurous husband, she and her two kidlets (and said adventurous husband) are always exploring the vast and varied wonders of the Pacific Northwest. From camping to cross-country skiing, Evangeline’s family embodies the Swedish maxim: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
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