Taking the Kids: Time-Traveling Back in History at Conner Prairie

But the Follow the North Star experience of traveling the Underground Railroad (escaped slaves literally would get their directions from the North Star) is one of the most powerful I've ever encountered at any museum, starting with when we're sized up by those who might want to buy us, treated like animals at auction, unable to help our children or to prevent family members from being separated. "You are dumber than my hogs," one potential owner says. "Keep your eyes down," commands another. "Don't you know your place!"

Museum officials don't recommend this program for kids under 12 and it is offered just a few weekends a year in November and April. I got a preview recently when I was in town to speak at the Society of American Travel Writers convention. I'd recommend it as a terrific learning tool for any family with tweens and teens.

"The experience makes you really get it," explains 14-year-old Jackson Burns, who is one of the costumed interpreters we meet along our journey -- he plays a gun-wielding slave hunter. "It's different than reading about this in a textbook."

That's an understatement. The back-story: We're slaves in 1836 Indiana about to be sold "back South." After we escape, we encounter another escaped slave who is risking his freedom and life to return in the hopes of freeing his wife and son. "It hurts that my son is growing up not knowing his daddy," he tells us, explaining that before he escaped, he and his family worked on plantations 15 miles apart and could only see each other on the occasional weekend.

We meet farm women who reluctantly help us. "You've got a right to freedom but not here!" they say, as their teenage daughters show us the road toward Roberts Settlement, a free black community about 15 miles away.

A distraught carpenter attempts to capture us for the $500 bounty on each of our heads, complaining that we slaves ruined his life. "How can I compete when you work for free?" he yells at us. "I've had it with your kind! When my wife got sick, I couldn't afford a doctor. It's your fault she died!"

We escape a second time when he goes to find rope to tie us up. There are many obvious lessons for today's world, where people are bullied, mistreated imprisoned and worse because of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs or sexual orientation, suggests Michelle Evans, who developed the program. Evans notes that the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati (www.freedomcenter.org) uses the Underground Railroad as a lens through which to explore a range of freedom issues.

At the end, we learn what would have likely happened to our group; some would have died crossing a river, some would have been recaptured. One would have disappeared never to be heard from again. I'm told I would have made it to freedom in Michigan.

"Is it worth the risk?" they ask us. "Only you can decide. Only you know."

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