One of the main reasons the blog came to is because of the Two Writing Teacher website and their weekly gathering of writers in the “Slice of Life” section. It’s a wonderful group of teachers, writing about their experiences. I laugh, I cry, I gather ideas from this group, and honestly, I wish I could be the writer that most of them are.

The reason I’m starting there is that WordPress has recently started posting “writing prompts” which many of those writers noticed and shared in their blogs. Many Tuesdays, I have a look at the screen and think, “What next,” (s/o to The West Wing and Jed Bartlett). Suddenly, topics are at our fingertips. It’s a blessing and curse for sure, but sometimes, it’s nice to see a prompt pop up and just write. Like today.

Today, as I logged it, the prompt was something to the effect of “what is your favorite place?”

#sweet

I know, right??

My family is not a wealthy family. My father was a teacher and my mom stayed home with us, then worked in a law office. We had what we needed, maybe not always what we wanted, but certainly what we needed.

However, when it came to summer vacations, we did a lot of stuff. We camped in many places in Iowa, state parks, and country parks, and we traveled to many different parts of the state. It was all tent camping, but we didn’t care at all. Campfires, fishing, canoeing, hiking, and picnicking were all the norm.

We also traveled outside the state too. Minnesota and Wisconsin were both places we traveled to many different times. The Cranberry Festival in Warrens, Wisconsin was a fall destination. There are pictures of our tent with frost all over it with a low temperature in the high teens/low twenties. There are pictures of us in shorts and t-shirts too. It was very primitive camping, but again, we didn’t care. We were there with family friends that we saw maybe twice a year, so there was so much running around and having fun to do that temperature didn’t matter (too much).

But my favorite place, for me, it’s always around trips to the Badlands and the Black Hills in South Dakota along with Devil’s Tower and the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. Now, the perspective of elementary and teenage me vs adult me is obviously different. There are so many different social things about the Black Hills that I never knew about until I started reading about the treatment of the Native Americans in the West. However, just the natural beauty of the place is just mind-boggling. Mount Rushmore, while an amazing place, is build on a place where it never should have been built. All that aside, I love the Badlands because it’s just so different! Now, our family had two separate storms go through while we were in the Badlands, storms that bend tent poles and scared the sh*t of us. And Wyoming? Can we start with Devil’s Tower?? If you’ve never been there, go. Book a trip, figure out the logistics and just go. My mom loves the mountains, so we go to the Bighorns by Sheridan, then go to a rodeo (where I learned I did not like rodeos). We trout fished, we hiked to see snow and throw snowballs, and we saw a moose cow and her calves, there’s SO much that learned about life in those mountains.

So, what is your favorite place or places? Leave me a comment and let me know! 🙂

Oh, happy Thursday!