Seeing sights, making memories during family trip out West | THE MOM STOP

As I write this, I'm sitting in an Adirondack chair at a cliff side campsite, watching the sun set just behind Mount Rushmore while drinking mint and rose infused ice water. For the moment, it's quiet.

In a word, it's anything but my usual evening.

My teenage daughter is in a tent, more than likely scrolling TikTok on her iPhone, while my 8-year-old daughter is "rock picking" nearby, looking for the "perfect piece of quartz," while desperately trying to make friends with other campground kids.

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We are on our second mother-daughter trip, this time to South Dakota to see the sights following a family reunion in Minnesota. In some ways, it's a grand tour of all the semi-educational tourist traps — we went to the Corn Palace, visited 1880 Town and ate at Wall Drug. We fed prairie dogs, stopped on the side of the road in our rental car to take pictures of wild buffalo. We visited Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore. We still plan to see the Crazy Horse monument and Devil's Tower.

As we have driven for hours, I can't help but be reminded of July 1991, when my grandparents took my sister and me on a three-week road trip to a family reunion and a grand tour of the American West.

While we won't make Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons this trip, I can't help but have flashbacks from my childhood. As I watched my two daughters feed peanuts to prairie dogs, I could almost see my younger sister, in her pigtail braids, trying to coax a prairie dog out of its hole. As I pulled over at an outlook in the Badlands to take a picture with my cellphone, I could imagine my grandfather taking time to read every descriptive plaque at every stop, the way he always did.

The trip in 1991 was magical, in my 10-year-old mind. A summer of buffalo and horseback rides, discovering a part of the country that was very much unlike the South that I call home.

There was swimming in Jenny Lake in the Tetons, and holding my nose at the smell of the sulfurous geysers of Yellowstone. There was making s'mores with my grandparents at their campsite, and waking up in the morning to the sound of my grandmother's percolating coffee.

Did I want to recreate some of that experience for my own kids? Perhaps. Was I successful? I'm not sure.

There's some kind of wonder that comes from seeing the world's natural beauty and realizing you are one tiny dot in the great history of this Earth. And yet today I constantly had to bug my girls to put down the iPads or the iPhone in the car and look out at the scenery outside.

But then, tonight, just before sunset, we sat around a campfire and roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. And it was nice.

And as I type this on my iPhone, the sun has just hidden itself behind the horizon of Mount Rushmore, and I'm listening to my 8-year-old who has now recruited other kids to search for quartz. And I'm reminded it's up to our kids to make their own memories — as parents, we just need to foster as many opportunities for that to happen as we can.

Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Making memories during mother-daughter trip | THE MOM STOP