I love the idea of a book trailer. This is the second one for Little Blog and I love it. Comes from someone in Ohio.

One question I get asked a lot about Little Blog on the Prairie is: Do camps like this really exist? I always explain how I made this camp up when I was nine, trapped in the back seat on a long car trip. Back then, it appeared to me to be a dream come true. Now I can see how it would be much less than that for most kids (and probably for me too).

When I was writing Little Blog, I tried looking around for camps like this and couldn’t find any, though there are several farms that will allow you to visit and camp out and help. These visits can include meals and quasi luxurious platform tent camping and run up to $300 a night.

But then…bingo! This past summer, a couple named Mark and Gail Hall, and their college student-age son James, spent a weekend living in a frontier cabin at Genesee Country Village Museum in upstate New York. They were fully indoctrinated before they took on the challenge and trained in how to perform the endless amounts of work that lifestyle required. And they only had to do it for two days. So how was it? I can only wonder how they fared. Perhaps I will look around to see if I can find a write up of their experience somewhere online.

Little Blog’s editor told me she saw an article about similar camps in the New York Times, but I haven’t been able to track it down. And a reader wrote me just the other day describing a trip her family took when she was a teenager, following the path of the Oregon trail…in a covered wagon. The food was better though: she remembers tons of cans of potato sticks. Potato sticks? Frontier food? Interesting….

If you live in the Princeton, NJ area come see me this Saturday: I will have a Little Blog on the Prairie table at the Princeton Public Library’s book fair 11am-4pm.

Where I’ll teach any and all how to make butter.

And where I will not wear a bonnet.

(I’m not kidding about either of those things.)

For more info on the festival, go to: www.princeton.lib.nj.us/children/festival/index.html