Ranching for City Kids

When we took a Yellowstone vacation last summer, it was easy to get the kids excited about the destination, with geysers, buffalo, elk and the like awaiting. It was harder to come up with a strategy for 1,000 miles of highway driving each way.

We scoured the Web ahead of time for ideas about where to make some worthwhile stops -- hoping to come up with something more fun than another night in a roadside motel. We hit upon the idea of staying at a working ranch for a night, largely skipping the traditional dude ranch routines (and fees) but getting at least a momentary sense of what it means to work the land for a living.

That led us to the Andrus Ranch in Idaho, which turned out to be just right. The Andrus family raise a lot of sheep on several thousand acres. They're no nonsense but friendly; they like guests as long as the guest are willing to adapt to their routines. And we were. Our younger son was delighted to be bottle-feeding orphaned lambs in the morning. Our older one enjoyed riding around on a small tractor, unloading bales of hay for the sheep to eat.

Will they remember it for the rest of their lives? Who knows, and if we wanted to create epic memories, we should have stayed a week and really immersed ourselves in the rancher's life. We were in the midst of a busy summer, without enough time to do everything we wanted. But even in small doses, it was a good experience.