Broaden Your Kids' Horizons

Travel is a powerful tool, one that can shape and open young minds—as HEIDI MITCHELL discovers,especially in a challenging place like Egypt.

- Heidi Mitchell

Everyone told me not to take my three kids to Egypt. A friend from Pakistan said I was bananas. A half-Egyptian colleague confided she wouldn’t be visiting her paternal grandparents for…ever. My mother begged me to go anywhere else. (“But, please, honey, at least register with the embassy.”)

Foolish? Perhaps. Defiant? Yes. Even with terror attacks and unrest in the Middle East dominating the news cycle, I was determined to see Egypt, a place I had dreamed of visiting since I first spied King Tut’s funerary mask at the Met as a four-year-old. For more than a decade, I’ve dragged my kids to every major Egyptian museum exhibition in Chicago, New York, and London. On road trips we listened to corny recordings of the myths of Osiris and Ra (“You rise, you rise…. You are the king of gods!”). The Puffin Classics Tales of Ancient Egypt never gathered dust on our bookshelves.