Our Adventures with Tom Sawyer

I've always loved reading aloud to my kids. Now that they're older, I don't have many opportunities to do that, so one of my favorite vacation traditions is choosing a book to read to them while we're on the long road to Colorado or making the endless trek back through western Kansas.

This year I started reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" before we ever hit Dodge City. It is a delicious book to read aloud, with the Southern dialect and lots of conversation. My boys were saying "I reckon" before the second stop for gas.

They liked the classic scene where Tom, forced to spend his Saturday whitewashing the fence, decides to pretend he's enjoying the work and eventually convinces all of his buddies to pay him marbles, beetles, or whatever "treasure" they had in their pockets for the privilege of helping him.

We camped by a lake, so Caleb, who's always loved fishing, took the first opportunity to put his line in. However, Harrison caught the first fish big enough to keep. Caleb, who also loves knives and collects them, begged Harrison to let him clean the fish. We laughed at the parallels to Tom Sawyer, and told Harrison he should have made Caleb include some marbles, or maybe a beetle or tick in the deal.

When a late afternoon shower forced us into the trailer for an hour, the kids asked me to read. When the rain stopped, we continued around the campfire.

Once we were out of the mountains and headed home, we got caught up in the drama of Tom and Becky being lost in the cave. I finished the book around Garden City, I think, with still plenty of daylight.

So we talked about our trip, and I asked each kid what they liked the best. Harrison said he liked hearing "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Well, Harrison, I don't know if I'd go that far. We certainly could have saved a lot of money by going to the library instead of hauling all of our four-wheelers to Colorado. But it was nice to hear.