Taking Them on an Adventure: The Literature Odyssey

If any current job of mine fades away, I’ve got a pocketful of other ventures I’d love to take on.

Full time writer.
Lost Valley Ranch Staff.
Professional Trip Planner.
Font Developer.
Product Tester.

I don’t even know if most of those are actual jobs.

But if there was a job where I could plan trips for people, I’d be all in.

I’d theme the trips for target audiences – A Literary South Adventure. Art Museums Only. Cities That Have Inspired Songs.

I’d pair food options and I’d provide opportunity to journal your feelings and record your memories. I’d even be happy to pick the sound track and the audio books, the podcasts and the road games – all lined up in colorful and quirky ways.

Let me file this idea away in My Retirement Options. (Which include me talking to my plants and rearranging my furniture every other day.)

I love planning trips. I love coordinating and researching, writing down agendas and mapping out distances from one stop to the next, surveying the areas and looking for stops that are well timed and provide a unique look at a specific location.

It’s not my job, but I have found a way to include it in one of my current jobs for now.

I am teaching an American Literature & Writing class to a group of high school students this year. It’s been delightful in many many ways. They are funny and smart, kind and thoughtful. They are learning to engage with literature and to express themselves clearly and succinctly. (Except when they’re not, of course. And then they are loud and talk over one another – and me. And also they complain about my choice of novels and my writing assignments.)

More years ago than I care to recall, before my own children were even an idea, I traveled to Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a mecca for literary nerds. I can’t even understand how that happened exactly.

But in one town, Concord, there are homes and gravesites and museums for so many famous American authors – Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne. Just a brief car ride away you can add in Melville and Dickinson and Irving.

It makes me giddy.

And so, this spring, I get the extreme pleasure of planning and taking a literature field trip to end all literature field trips.

An Odyssey.

I’ve got routes mapped out. Surprise stops. Scheduled tours. We get to see a replica of the Globe Theatre. (Sure, I know Shakespeare isn’t American but we studied him last year and he influences so much literature anyway and it’s directly on the path – so we are stopping, I can’t help myself!)

You guys – we get to take a writing class with an expert on Melville in the room where Melville wrote and with the desk where he penned his last novel!

We have a tour of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and we will be visiting the house where Hawthorne was born. We will walk through the home that inspired Little Women and stand inside a replica in the same location as Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond.

And there’s SO MUCH MORE.

I’ve had the best time calling and researching, making plans and setting up tours. I’m still trying to see if we can actually sleep at the Wayside Inn, made famous through a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and where he actually lived. (It’s a pricey little old-fashioned bed and breakfast though, so I’m crossing my fingers!)

There are nine students in my class and we’re bringing three adults to chaperone.

We’ve had a fundraising night at Chick-fil-a and we have a few more events like that scheduled to help offset the cost.

I can’t wait to share this experience with my students. Naturally, I even have coordinating audio books planned, journal entries prepped and road trip games stacked up in the notes section of my phone. We’ll do the classic license plate game of course – maybe we’ll find all fifty.

We’re cramming an awful lot into about five days, including the fifteen hour (one way) drive! I wish I had two weeks!

If any of you have any suggestions for great lodging outside of Boston, Mass. and Albany, NY, as well as near Baltimore or outside DC, preferably the south or west side, I’m all ears.

And if you love adventure too and want to live vicariously through us, I’m going to share a link here if you’d like to donate to our odyssey.

Another surprise bonus is that this whole trip allows every student in the class to count this year’s course as an Honors Course! It’s truly my favorite sort of education – hands on.

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