Heidi, Toad and the Life Adventurous by Ann Banks

oad and the Life Adventurous It is the nature of armchair travelers to stay put, reading, not wandering. But sometimes, when the wind is right, a book can send us on our way.

On a winter's night some years ago in Oxford, England, Christina Hardyment sat before the fire and read to her daughters from The Wind in the Willows. This was their first encounter with Toad, one of literature's most seductive dream peddlers. Toad is by nature a traveling animal. He is met ''resting in a wicker garden chair, with a preoccupied expression on his face and a large map spread out on his knees.'' Before long, he's expounding to Ratty and Mole his philosophy of the Life Adventurous:

''Here today and up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!''

Reading those lines stirred in Ms. Hardyment a Toadlike urge to fling off the shackles of everyday routine. The next thing, she and her family had set out in a yellow camper on the journey of a lifetime, a 4,000-mile quest for the roots of storybook Europe. They tracked Pinocchio in Tuscany, explored Hans Brinker's Holland, looked for witches and wolves in German forests, hunted Babar in Burgundy.

I picked up Ms. Hardyment's 1987 account of their adventures, ''Heidi's Alp,'' in search of a few hours diversion -- and found myself lured into a world of daring and delightful possibilities. What The Wind in the Willows had done for Ms. Hardyment, Heidi's Alp did for me. Christina Hardyment became my heroine, an even more inspiring apostle of waywardness than Toad himself. Toad may have followed the open road, but he didn't take along four children in his yellow cart.

Not that I necessarily meant to trace Ms. Hardyment's tracks (for one thing, I was three children short). But her breadth of vision encouraged me to think about expanding my own family's horizons.

We'd taken our school-age daughter on vacations -- to the beach, to Grandma's -- and made the obligatory haj to Disney World. It was time to consider voyages of discovery, the kind of travel that challenges coping skills, stretches the imagination, and allows for the possibility of magic.

Our pursuit of the Life Adventurous in the last decade has taken us to foreign countries and to back country; some trips have meant tents, sleeping bags and whitewater rapids, others have involved passports, strange languages, and, one storybook winter, Heidi's Swiss alp (where Kate christened our sleds Schwanly and Barli, after Heidi's uncle's willful goats).

Sometimes, Kate, my husband, Peter, and I have traveled together, a compact nuclear family. Often, it's been just Kate and me. And on one wonderful, intergenerational occasion, my mother took Kate and me on a driving tour of Wales, where we explored castles and visited members of the family my grandmother had left behind when she emigrated. (As an intrepid traveler, my mother was easily the equal of Christina Hardyment.)

Whatever our destination, we've been budget-minded, given to picnicking on a riverbank or railroad station bench. (I don't consider this a significant compromise, since travel with children pretty much precludes serious dining experiences anyway.)

Air fare is generally the biggest expense, so I've become expert at harvesting frequent flier miles, discount coupons and seasonal sales. We even volunteer to get bumped in case our flight is overbooked; twice we've been awarded free tickets that way, and consider it the equivalent to winning the lottery.

Whenever trip preparations are underway, I expect to hear graphic warnings against ''the horrors of travel in general and with children in particular,'' as Ms. Hardyment herself observed. At first, I found myself internalizing this cautionary chorus. What if Kate didn't like the food? What if I found unremitting motherhood hard to take at times? What if the hotel was a dump? -- a distinct possibility given our budget.

By now, all those things and more have come to pass and we've survived. (She ate rice; I got grumpy; we changed hotels.) In the long run, none of it has mattered much, and we've learned to allow for both ups and downs.

Of course, the effort to negotiate an unfamiliar environment is inevitably humbling. How do you pitch this tent, anyway? What's the system in this country for using a pay phone? Will the waiters bring plain water if you ask? And how do you ask in their language? Nothing like total ignorance of what's expected to make you feel frustrated and stupid -- like a kid, in fact.

I like traveling to strange places with Kate because it requires me to join her on the steep learning curve that is the constant condition of childhood. Fumbling around together has been great for our relationship.

I do have an agenda -- the time-honored educational one. Depending on our destination, we might read the ''Tales of King Arthur'' en route to Wales, or on the way to Belize study the nocturnal habits of parrot fish (they spin themselves a sleeping bag from their mouths). This is as much for my benefit as for Kate's; seeing that she gets the most out of our travels has prevented me from getting lazy.

BUT I've tried to take a relaxed approach. If Merlin's prophecies aren't holding our interest that day, we explore whatever Kate finds more exciting -- a wax museum, possibly, or a store that sells China cat figurines.

Here again, Christina Hardyment is my guide. In the course of the family's travels, she found herself imposing less and less on her children, learning to ''sit back and follow them'' instead of trying to lead all the time. They had as much to teach her as she them, Ms. Hardyment came to understand.

''Looking at the world through the children's eyes made it look a lot less jaded and tired and a lot more fun,'' she wrote. That has been my experience, too.

I'd always admired in passing the smartly dressed Parisian children clustered around the sailboat pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, but with Kate for company I was no longer a mere observer. Being 9, Kate was first to master the subtleties of guiding the progress of our rented wooden sailboat with a baton, but she generously showed me how and allowed me a turn. In a city where I have stored up many favorite memories over many years, the afternoon my daughter and I lingered by the boat pond tops the list.

And so I maintain that kids make great traveling companions -- contrary to popular myth, and in defiance of the anticipatory Schadenfreude that passes for friendly advice. We who can hitch a ride on our children's curiosity and imagination are the lucky ones.