Excerpt from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But you can't save an addictive dreamer from himself, and that jackass happens to be me. Already, powerful forces were drawing me west. I felt an irresistible urge to forsake my life back east for a rapturous journey across the plains.

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The contagion of rogue travel started early with me. I was raised during the 1950s and early 1960s on a ramshackle old horse farm in New Jersey. My father, a magazine publisher in New York City, was boundlessly energetic and inventive, devoted to what he considered the pressing entertainment needs of his eleven children. While the rest of the country raged over Pontiac tailfins or played golf, we chased around the menagerie that my father had slapped together from a nineteenth-century dairy—barns converted to horse stables, chicken houses and goat pens, a collection of more than twenty-five antique carriages and wagons, and a large stone patio and picnic area set under giant shade maples, where my father entertained the lovable drunks from his local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. We drove to church every Sunday in a four-seat surrey pulled by a team of matched bays, and sleighed into the toy store in town in December to pick up our Christmas presents. On lazy summer nights, my father loved nothing more than loading his children and all of our neighborhood friends—there could be twenty kids or more—into the dilapidated yellow school bus that he had purchased at a junkyard for such outings. Then we drove down to the Dairy Queen in Bernardsville and gorged on ice cream sundaes.

Over the winter of 1958, brooding in front of his fireplace one night, my father announced that he was bored with the school bus. As a family, he thought, we needed an experience that would draw us together, something that would engender in us the spirit of the American pioneers. I don't have any idea where this notion came from. But the top-rated American television show that year was NBC's Wagon Train, starring Ward Bond, and we were all fans. We didn't consider it outlandish when my father told us that, for our summer vacation, we were going on a covered wagon trip to Pennsylvania. It would be a combined camping and coaching expedition, with stops along the way at historic sites like Valley Forge and Gettysburg that my father wanted his children to see.

My father had a knack for making the complex seem simple, and we were relaxed about our preparations for the trip. One January weekend that year we drove down to the Pennsylvania Dutch country in Lancaster County and made arrangements with our regular Mennonite wagon builder, Jonas Reif, to convert a large farm wagon with hoops and a canvas top. We bought our draft horses, a team of Percheron-Morgan crosses named Benny and Betty, from Jonas's son-in-law, Ivan Martin. My father, my older brother, and I spent a few delightful Saturday afternoons that spring banging around the barn with rusty hammers and saws, modifying our rig with racks for cooking pots and pans, hooks for water buckets, and a drop-down chuck wagon table for cooking meals. My father was a former barnstorming pilot and World War II flight instructor who had lost his left leg in a bad air crash in 1946. He stowed his maps for the trip in an old woolen stump sock that he placed underneath the wagon seat. With shoelaces, he hung a compass and a clock from the hoop over the front seat.

We clattered down our drive early one Saturday morning in July that year, bound for Pennsylvania, and that was a beautiful junket for a father to share with his children. I was seven years old and our covered wagon trip was the dream summer of my youth. In those days New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania were still undeveloped, and we drove down through the green farmlands of Somerset and Hunterdon counties on quiet state highways or dirt roads, camping at dairies and state parks. In the mornings, while the waters of the Delaware or the Schuylkill river gurgled past our campsite, my father would rise at dawn and cook up a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and home fries over a wood fire, while my older brother and I fed and watered the horses. Along the cool, shaded lanes of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we sang songs together to pass the time, and took turns learning to drive the team. On warm afternoons the bumping of the wheels over gravel roads and the rhythmic clopping of hooves made me sleepy, and I loved stretching out in the back of the wagon and napping on a bale of hay.

Excerpted from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. Copyright © 2015 by Rinker Buck. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.