‘I read. I travel. I become.’

Road Trip Tweet from 2012: We’re listening to “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” while driving in preparation for visiting the Holocaust Museum later this week.

I think back to that tweet often when planning road trips. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was a highlight of our trip to Washington, DC, that summer. It was educational, enlightening, horrifying and humbling. And it was even more impactful because of Anne Frank.

“Think about what you saw.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Washington, DC.

This has been somewhat of a tradition with us – learning more about where we are traveling, either prior to the trip or while we’re driving.

It started several years earlier when I happened upon a children’s book at the public library. “Freedom on the Menu” tells the story of the Civil Rights Movement and the Greensboro sit-ins through the eyes of a child.

Soon after reading it with our kids, my husband was invited to present at a conference in North Carolina. So during my planning for that trip, we decided we could venture off our path a bit and stop in Greensboro to visit the Woolworth’s store where the sit-ins occurred. What an amazing teaching experience for our small children.

We read the book again after the 2012 trip to DC when we saw the lunch counter at the National Museum of American History.

This past summer, we traveled to the Land of Lincoln and stayed at this great Airbnb that had tons of books and movies about Lincoln. So cool and quaint (we highly recommend it and you can check it out here: The Loft on the Square in Petersburg).

We enjoyed reading while relaxing before we went to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

It’s not always books. Sometimes we just read articles or blog posts or even simply the information found on the destination’s website. But it always transforms our road trips into more than what it would have been without that knowledge.

Derek Walcott, the St. Lucian Nobel Prize winning poet and playwright, said: “I read. I travel. I become.”

That’s been true for us. What about for you? Any book/destination recommendations? We’d love to hear about them.

Advertisement