Leaving Lincoln

When I was growing up, my family took one weeklong vacation a year. This was to some grand location and involved at least 1000 miles roundtrip. From Iowa, we took summer trips to the Grand Canyon, Detroit, and the Colorado mountains. Those are the trips burned into my memory, as those are the places where our van’s muffler disintegrated, we hit a deer at 2am driving home, and my father ran over my foot, respectively. Ahh, memories.

Someday I hope to instill such lifelong traumas into my children. For now, we’re taking shorter trips that involve hundreds of miles, the kind of drive we can complete between meals. We stay with relatives who are excited to see the children, and leave quickly, before their novelty wears off.

Such was our recent trip. We visited Elle’s aunt and uncle in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln is the home of the University of Nebraska, but it also has some redeeming qualities, such as easy access to the world-class zoo in Omaha. It also has some nice amenities within its city limits.

The hospitality of our hosts was wonderful. They fed us, provided sleeping rooms for everyone, and had an extra bed for me to nap on when Abbie commandeered our bed during naptime. They had toys for the kids to use inside, a sandbox and wading pool for the kids to use outside, and numerous non-breakable pretties scattered throughout the house to distract them when they tried to run in opposite directions. The only thing missing was a fenced-in yard, so Abbie and I spent some quality time walking about the neighborhood.* Overall the stay was wonderful and I can’t thank our hosts enough.

We spent one day enjoying Lincoln’s finest cultural establishments that appealed to the 3-and-under crowd. Specifically, that means their children’s zoo, and children’s museum. Too often, when the prefix “children’s” is attached to an attraction, it means it’s an inferior attraction. The exhibits aren’t as exciting, but they throw out a few brightly colored, simply worded signs that supposedly appeal to children. That’s the Lincoln Children’s Zoo. The animals were lethargic, the exhibits were mundane, and little kids were running and screaming everywhere.

The Lincoln Children’s Museum was the opposite. I had low expectations after the kids trudged through the zoo, propped up on sugary snacks, and screamed through their nap. When we walked in, I thought I’d find stuffy exhibits hidden behind Plexiglas, filled with objects not-quite-exotic enough to interest adults. Instead, we found three open floors of stuff for kids to play with. They had a water exhibit where kids could shoot water guns at targets. They had a pint-sized lunar rover that the boys played inside for a half-hour. They had a couple bubble stations on a balcony to occupy Abbie when she grew tired of watching her brothers in the lunar rover. They had a room filled with thousands of building blocks, er, planks called Keva Planks for me to play with. I was so smitten, I bought a set on our way through the gift shop, and hope to share them with my children some day. Despite the rapidly encroaching naptime, our children nary complained until we drug them away to return them to bed. I highly recommend the Lincoln Children’s Museum to anyone passing through town with young children.

We drove home the next day, sticking to our short trip ideals. We stopped at the Omaha Zoo on the way through. As I said, the Omaha Zoo is world class, filled with animals and exhibits you might expect to see only in much larger metropolitan areas. They have an indoor desert, an indoor aquarium, and separate indoor facilities for apes and monkeys. We spurned all of these indoor facilities upon arrival to visit the outdoor exhibits. It was 95 degrees that day, and we wanted to see the outdoor exhibits before the outdoor sun could bake our family to a cherry red. This proved to be our downfall, since instead of cramming in animal fun before the heat hit, we were walking around in sweltering heat with cranky children. The kids’ patience was spent by the time we reached the air-conditioned exhibits. We sprinted through the buildings, hoping the children would stop screaming long enough to appreciate the scarcity of the animals around them, and eventually gave up halfway through the aquarium.

When we left, our hosts walked us to the zoo gate, and returned to see the animals. We loaded into the car, and drove home, thankful that our hosts were still pleasant to us as they said goodbye. We were also thankful that the kids fell asleep a half-hour down the road. Maybe next year we can stay longer, let the kids soak in a little more of a new town, enjoy a little finer dining than convenience store and concession stand food, and give the car time to catastrophically break in a way the kids will remember for years.

* On one such journey, Abbie ran ahead of me singing, “Where are we going? (clap, clap, clap) Big hill!”