By TRACEE M. HERBAUGH

If you’re going to be road-tripping with your family this summer, get ready to embrace unexpected moments of both connection and inevitable chaos.

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I found both when I packed up the car with my husband and two kids — one of them a teenager — for the eight-hour drive from Boston to Niagara Falls. We had taken long road trips as a family in the past, but our kids, now 8 and 14, were older. My son, firmly in his “closed-door, don’t talk to me” phase, wasn’t exactly thrilled about spending over 460 miles trapped in our smallish Nissan Rogue. We also live in a part of the country where we don’t spend much time in cars in our everyday life.

How would we all manage the close quarters?

Here’s some of what I learned — along with advice from the experts — about not only surviving a family road trip but having a good time:

First, why do it?

Many road-trip veterans cite the chance to bond and create family memories. Eighteen-year-old Samara Worsham, for example, spent 30 days crossing 25 states with her family in 2022. Now preparing to leave for college, she says she cherishes that time on the road.

“There were long stretches with no cellular data, leaving us nothing to do but talk,” she said.

Along with visiting U.S. landmarks, Worsham’s fondest memories include hotel pool swims with her siblings, and her father’s mission to sample every fast-food chain across the country.

There are practical advantages to the family car trip too.

“It’s more economical than flying, especially with a big family,” says Jamie Davis Smith, a lawyer and writer from Washington, D.C., who takes a road trip every year with her husband and children. “Plus, you don’t have to rent a car at the destination.”

Get family input on the itinerary

Alain Robert, founder of The Travelologist, a Canadian travel agency, recommends including the whole family in planning.

“Ask what they’d like to see or do. Build around everyone’s interests,” he advised. “Once you have a backbone itinerary, share it and manage expectations.”

My family, in particular the kids, wanted to get there as soon as possible. They had their eyes on the destination, not the journey.

Include some cheesy stops — if you can take the time

Davis Smith said her family loves to discover quirky roadside attractions; on one trip, they had fun stopping at the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama — a store that sells lost airline luggage.

Inspired, I downloaded the Roadtrippers app and mapped out a few detour-worthy stops. Our shortlist included the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, New York, as well as the Schuyler Mansion (of “Hamilton” fame) in Albany, New York.

But best-laid plans… We quickly realized that an eight-hour haul didn’t leave much wiggle room for exploration. Lesson learned: Keep daily driving to six hours or less if you want time to explore. We didn’t have time for either of those two stops.

Whether you bring your pet or not, prepare for extra costs

We briefly considered bringing Rosie, our 2-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, but the hotel we’d booked at Niagara wasn’t dog-friendly. No friends were available to watch her, so at the last minute, we boarded her at our vet — a first for Rosie.

We hadn’t expected she would need two new vaccines, and we had to squeeze in a vet appointment two days before departure. This meant a steep bill the morning we left, and boarding costs awaiting us when we returned.

Travel journalist Kelly Burch, who road-tripped around the U.S. for seven months with her husband, two kids and senior dog, warned that pet policies on the road can be unpredictable. One budget hotel near Yellowstone National Park wouldn’t even allow their dog to stay in their RV on the property.

“Triple check pet policies,” she advised.

Teens…

Knowing my teenager would need space, I splurged on a junior suite. He got his own bed, slept late and had the space to recharge. The suite came with a small kitchen and a breathtaking view of Horseshoe Falls — well worth the extra cost for three nights.

If we’d stayed longer, I would have reconsidered the splurge. But since we saved money by not flying, the room felt like a worthwhile tradeoff.

… and screens

If your kids are on the younger side, divert them with family car games.

“If you start the screen early, it can be difficult to convince them to do anything else,” says freelance journalist Stratton Lawrence, 43, who has written for Travel & Leisure about his family road trips — without devices. He’s driven with his young kids and wife from South Carolina to the Pacific Coast twice, including one three-month stretch on the road.

Even older kids, he says, will appreciate something like a deck of cards or a paper atlas to see the geography.

“If you’re going to be in a car for 100-plus hours, the kids aren’t going to be entertained watching TV that whole time, so you have to have other things,” he said.

Overall, I think my teenager thought the trip was OK. His friend happened to be visiting Niagara Falls with her family and staying in the same hotel where we stayed. That was a welcome surprise. He also seemed to like our daytime outings, especially the boat ride into the Horseshoe Falls, where we got drenched with water.

I figure, if a trip is mostly OK for a teenager, it’s a success.

Few initiatives of the Trump administration more seriously undermine our understanding of the nation’s past than Executive Order 14253 from March 27, which promises “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments.”

The order directs the Interior secretary to cleanse all National Park Service sites of any signage that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” and instead “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” The Park Service staff was also instructed to purge gift shops of books that could be construed as critical of any American. In a similar vein, the Smithsonian Institution was ordered to remove “improper ideology” from its properties to assure they reflected “American greatness.”

Unwilling to depend on park personnel to enforce the patriotism mandate, the Trump administration is enlisting park visitors to report potentially offending displays and ranger talks that present an insufficiently sanitized account of American history.

On June 9, acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron instructed regional directors to “post signage that will encourage public feedback via QR code and other methods that are viable” concerning anything they encounter at a park site that they believe denigrates the nation’s history. (It is worth noting that when queried about the QR code directive, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed to know nothing of the mandate, although he signed it on May 20.) How will the Trump administration respond if a visitor uses one of the mandatory QR codes to file a complaint?

And that is just the beginning. The Trump administration has also made clear it would like to eliminate entire sites that are not “National Parks, in the traditionally understood sense.” That means targeting those features that lack the grandeur of Yosemite and the Grand Tetons: smaller parks, sites and memorials, many of which honor women and minorities.

Generally lacking soaring redwoods or massive gorges, these sites — many in urban areas where Trump’s revisionist history has not caught on — would seem to describe places in California such as César Chavez National Monument outside Bakersfield, Manzanar National Historic Site and Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond.

Trump and his ahistorical myrmidons — he just mused that the Civil War ended in 1869 — regularly display an abysmal ignorance of basic American history. In their view, such federal (and presumably state) sites should present only a simplistic view of our complex 249-year history, one that virtually ignores the contributions and struggles of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Even before we see how many “tips” the Park Service’s invitation elicits from visitors eager to rat on rangers, the wording of the executive order itself is chilling. Any signage or lecture that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” — and who is to say what constitutes disparagement? — must be replaced with rhetoric that emphasizes “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Needless to say, the many sites that tell the stories of civil rights and anti-slavery struggles, the Civil War, the role of immigrants, the battles for labor rights and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people are going to have a challenging time ensuring they in no way offend those willing to acknowledge only uninterrupted “greatness” of the American story. Sometimes our greatness has been manifested by our progress toward a more perfect union — and that story cannot be told without mentioning imperfections.

One need not have a PhD in history to appreciate the dire threat presented by these efforts to replace historical scholarship with uncritical flag-waving. Historians have an obligation to challenge myth, to uncover obscured stories, to give voice to those who were unable to fully participate in earlier eras of the American story because of their race, ethnicity, gender or viewpoints.

That is why our government has protected sites including Ellis Island (which President Lyndon B. Johnson added to Statue of Liberty National Monument), Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and Stonewall National Monument (both recognized by President Obama). Trump’s Orwellian orders seek to undo a half-century of scholarship that revealed a far more complex and nuanced history than the simplified versions taught to generations of schoolchildren.

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Fortunately, professional historians have not been cowed like many university leaders, law firms and others who have shamefully capitulated to Trump’s assault on free speech and intellectual integrity. A March statement from more than 40 historical societies condemned recent efforts to “purge words, phrases, and content that some officials deem suspect on ideological grounds [and] to distort, manipulate, and erase significant parts of the historical record.”

The national parks consistently rate as one of the most popular features of American government. Neither their rangers nor their exhibits should be intimidated into parroting a sanitized and distorted version of the nation’s past. As the historians declared, “We can neither deny what happened nor invent things that did not happen.” Americans should use those QR codes to send a clear message rejecting efforts to manipulate our history to suit an extremist ideological and political agenda.

John Lawrence is a visiting professor at the University of California’s Washington Center and a former staff director of the House Committee on Natural Resources. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

You may have noticed that the 100th anniversary of the so-called “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, has rolled around this month, with various offerings, notably my colleague Ron Grossman’s excellent recent story, which informed me, among many things, that the town’s main street “took on a carnival atmosphere. Rival trainers brought chimpanzees to town —  including a celebrated simian named Joe Mendi, who wore a plaid suit and a fedora hat. Vendors hawked toy monkeys and Bibles. Shop windows had monkey-theme displays.”

Read that story and perhaps you too will be compelled to dive deeper into the past. The simplest way is to watch the 128-minute 1960 movie based on the events that took place, mostly in a sweltering courtroom, from July 10-21 in 1925.

I did that, and “Inherit the Wind” is a great movie. Adapted from a successful play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and based on real events, it is dominated by those towering actors Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. They portray, respectively, opposing attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, though they’re given the names Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady.

See what I mean by “based on.” Still, Amazon touts the movie as the “thrilling recreation of the most titanic courtroom battles of the century,” hyperbolically ignoring a trial the year before, when Darrow took on the defense of killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago. (There’s a pretty good movie of that too, 1959’s “Compulsion”).

The trial, more formally called the Scopes trial, or the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, involved a high school teacher, John Scopes, who was accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools.

After watching “Inherit,” I did some further digging and feel fortunate to have learned some encouraging things about Scopes. For instance, “He did not capitalize at all on his celebrity,” said John Mark Hansen. “He had offers of tens of thousands of dollars to go on vaudeville stages and talk about the trial. Instead, he came to the University of Chicago to further his education, never seeking attention.”

Hansen is a longtime University of Chicago political science professor and Hyde Park resident. He is also a talented writer, and his “Evolution on Trial” story in the university’s magazine makes for enlightening and lively reading.

Among the other things I learned:

Darrow, the principal defense attorney, knew many University of Chicago scientists and professors, because for years, living in an apartment on 60th Street near Stony Island Avenue, “he hosted an informal biology club … directing discussions on biology, religion and evolution,” Hansen writes.

He recruited some of these folks to testify at the trial, and they stayed in “a big Victorian house on the edge of Dayton,” which is described as “ancient and empty … now crudely furnished with iron cots, spittoons, playing cards and the other camp equipment of scientists,” Hansen writes. “It was called the Mansion, Defense Mansion, and, inevitably, the Monkey House.”

Scientists, lawyers and supporters of John Scopes assembled on the steps of the “defense mansion” outside of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial in July 1925. The defense mansion was a Victorian house where the defense team and witnesses stayed during the trial. The scientists did not get a chance to testify at the trial. (Chicago Herald and Examiner)

Scopes decided to study geology at the University of Chicago. His tuition toward earning a doctorate was paid for by a grant and other donations. But when he applied for a third year to finish his studies, the president of another school that administered the fellowships refused to consider his application, saying, “As far as I am concerned, you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.”

And so he did, fading away into life as a working geologist, Hansen tells me, living in Texas and Louisiana. He did return to the University of Chicago campus for a conference in 1960. When asked about the 1925 trial, Hansen writes, “Scopes had little to add. ‘I hope that I don’t ever have to go through something like that again.’”

“Some of the issues of the trial still echo,” says Hansen. “Ever debated is the role of religion in public school classrooms, as is the question ‘Who controls what gets taught in school?’”

Bryan died only days after the Scopes trial and Darrow lived until 1938, the most famous lawyer in the world then, and arguably still. Reading Hansen’s fine story and watching “Inherit the Wind” put Darrow solidly in my mind and compelled me to go to see a small and pretty bridge in Jackson Park. It sits behind the Museum of Science and Industry, named in Darrow’s honor and dedicated in 1957 by relatively new mayor Richard J. Daley. Closed to pedestrians since 2013, it’s sadly in bad shape, recently having been listed as one of Preservation Chicago’s 7 Most Endangered Buildings for 2025, noting, “As necessary maintenance continues to be deferred, the bridge is increasingly vulnerable to further disrepair. If conditions worsen, demolition and removal are possible outcomes.”

Atty. Clarence Darrow talks at the Scopes trial in 1925. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

I also found the time to read Darrow’s 20,000 some-word closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb sentencing, the words that saved those two men from execution.

Here are some of them: “You may hang these boys; you may hang them, by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. … I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

A Northwestern Medicine research lab has found a usually harmless virus in brain samples from Parkinson’s patients. The idea that Parkinson’s could be linked to a virus had been theorized for years, but this is the first study to pinpoint a specific virus as more common in Parkinson’s patients.

“The message that we want to give to the general public is, it opens a new field of investigation, something that we didn’t know about,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, Northwestern’s chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology and lead author of the study.

Parkinson’s disease is a movement disorder caused by the loss of neurons that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain. Why these neurons break down is unknown, but it’s thought that this breakdown is caused by many factors, both genetic and environmental.

The team used a tool called ViroFind, which is able to test samples for all known viruses that infect humans much quicker than the usual one-at-a-time “brute force” method. The lab found human pegivirus, or HPgV, in 5 of the 10 Parkinson’s-affected brains they tested, and none of the brains without Parkinson’s.

“Fifty percent of any population having this virus would be very, very high,” Barbara Hanson, the lab’s post-doctoral fellow, said. Estimates calculate HPgV as being present in about 5% of blood donors in North America, and people with healthy immune systems generally lose the virus within two years of exposure. It is not known to cause disease in humans, so most who catch the virus will never know they had it.

Before this study, Hanson said, HPgV had not been found in human brain tissue. It was understood to primarily “live” in blood.

“For this virus to be present in the brain, there must be a reason for that,” Koralnik said.

This doesn’t mean that the virus itself is a trigger for Parkinson’s, though. It could be that an as-yet unidentified genetic mutation that makes people susceptible to Parkinson’s, also allows for the virus to spread throughout the body differently than in people without the mutation.

And even if further research shows HPgV as a direct cause of Parkinson’s, both Koralnik and Dr. Danny Bega, medical director of Northwestern’s Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center, said people shouldn’t necessarily worry about getting HPgV.

A patient likely has to encounter a couple of different factors before they develop Parkinson’s, Bega said. He puts it in terms of “hits” — a hit could be genetic, or it could be environmental, such as exposure to a virus or pesticide. These “hits” build up over time until there are enough factors to cause the neuron degeneration specific to Parkinson’s.

It’s possible that this is why Parkinson’s risk increases with age, Bega said. The longer you live, the more of these “hits” you take, as you encounter different Parkinson’s risk factors throughout your life.

“I always caution people who try to blame their Parkinson’s on one thing,” he said. “Rest assured, it’s never one thing that you could have done or should have done differently.”

The work to treat and hopefully one day prevent Parkinson’s is being done through finding these factors and eliminating them one by one. “The more targets that we have, the more likely we are to be able to achieve a treatment that actually can slow things down,” Bega said.