This Week · Adventure & Exploration

Adventure & Exploration — if you could set out to discover anywhere, where would you go?

For littler ones: Where would you most want to explore?

This week we're wondering about adventure — about the pull to set out and discover what's over the next hill, or out past the end of the rail. Here's the question worth turning over at the supper table: if you could set out to discover anywhere, where would you go? We'll wonder about it alongside Sacagawea, a young Lemhi Shoshone mother who crossed a whole continent with her baby on her back; two brothers from a bicycle shop who wanted to leave the ground; and a galloping little poem about everything that rushes past a train window.

This week's stories

American

Sacagawea and the Long Road Home

She was about sixteen, a young Lemhi Shoshone mother, when she set out with the Corps of Discovery — her two-month-old son Pomp tied snug in a cradleboard on her back. Over a year and a half she crossed four thousand miles of unmapped country: dug wild turnips to feed hungry men, reached calmly into a cold river to save the expedition's journals when her husband froze, and one day met the Shoshone chief who turned out to be her own brother, lost to her since childhood. The honest part comes first — she'd been taken from her people as a girl, and married off as a teenager, neither of her choosing. This story keeps her at the center, and follows her all the way to the sea and all the way home.

American

The Wright Brothers and the First Flight

Two brothers from a Dayton bicycle shop wanted to do the thing most people said could not be done: lift a person off the ground. So they read everything, built kites, built a wind tunnel in the back room, carved their own propellers, and crashed gliders into the soft sand at Kitty Hawk three summers running. On a bitter cold morning in December 1903, with five people watching and a borrowed camera pointed at the rail, the Flyer lifted off the sand for twelve seconds. Almost no newspaper believed it. The world had tilted, and didn't yet know.

Classics

From a Railway Carriage

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this galloping little poem from the window of a moving train, and it runs the way a train runs — faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses and hedges and ditches flying past. A child gathering brambles, a tramp, a runaway cart, a mill, a river: each one glimpsed and gone in the wink of an eye. It's the smallest kind of adventure — the whole rushing world seen from a window — and a lovely one to say out loud and let pick up speed.

Talk about it

If you could set out tomorrow to discover anywhere — near or far, real or made-up — where would you go first?
What's the difference between a place you'd want to visit and a place you'd want to explore?
Would you rather discover somewhere brand new that no one has seen, or go deep into a place you already love?

A new question every week.

Listen together in the app — short audio stories for kids 4–10, at bedtime, on the drive, in the drop-off line.

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