On Friday through Saturday my family, with several other friends’ families went for a 4 mi hike, fished, and adventured. It was cold and I got sick. The last day I was miserable because of that, and I found my self craving spinach and doughnuts.
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hf
What are numbers? I will tell you what numbers are. Numbers are 123456789 and10. That is what numbers are.
Aren’t sloths cute? To me they are! Why not you? Just a minute please. One fact about sloths is that they live in trees.
-lb
I found this book while looking through family travel sites on the web– “Family on the Loose: The Art of Traveling with Kids” by Ashley Steel. It’s currently a free borrow with Amazon Prime so I downloaded it. It is a GREAT resource for not just family travel, but even eating out domestically. There’s a lot for smaller kids and even breastfeeding which I skipped over since it doesn’t pertain to me. What I love the most are all the charts and worksheets that you can copy and paste into a journal for the kids to work on. There’s a lot of ideas for keeping kids engaged and interesting, and a lot of fun games and ideas for things to do while waiting in an airport. So many of these don’t even have to be used while traveling – there are many restaurant dinners where I wished I’d had some of these ideas! One example: the game “pancake” in which one person is “it.” The other family members go around the table and ask whatever question they would like but the only answer they can give is “pancake” and they cannot laugh! Whoever makes them laugh first is “it” and gets to pick a new word. Many of the ideas are grouped by age so it’s not one-size-fits all.
There are travel checklists and even checklists that are done with pictures so non or early readers can pack their own suitcases. I especially appreciate all the advice on how prepping your kid for the trip and what to expect makes everything smoother.
While I borrowed this on my Kindle I think I’m going to order the paper version so I can make copies of all the helpful charts and games that they include to put into the kids’ journals and take along with us. If you’re considering a similar trip (or hell, even a trip to Chipotle) I would check this book out for some truly wonderful ideas.
It’s looking more and more like starting in Japan in August will just make everyone relatively miserable with the humidity. I once spent a summer in rural Louisiana and Houston, and my most salient memories are quickly scuttling from one air conditioned box to another and feeling like showers were both the best thing ever and the most useless thing ever. I remember the same thing spending summers in India as a child during the monsoon season, but without the a/c and with lots of mosquitos.
It seems foolish to me to wait so long to go somewhere and know that you’re walking into a hell of humidity where you’ll never want to be outside. You can start in the northern and more mountainous regions, but even if you spend a few weeks there it’ll still be bad on the eastern coast. So, what to do?
My new idea is to follow the weather! This means that we start in the Southern Hemisphere, namely in Australia and/or New Zealand and then work our way northward following the good weather. Many regions of Australia are relatively temperate during this time. New Zealand is in winter, but our ski passes will give us a free week at Mt. Ruapehu and I think it would be a dream to ski there if we could! I’m going to pretend that the practicality of taking ski clothing isn’t an issue, maybe we can just rent like you can here?
So now that I’ve read a bunch of books on Japan and gotten all excited for that, I’m waiting for some books on Australia and New Zealand to come in from the library so I can dream about those.
Looking at the map the plan would be to spend a week in Australia/New Zealand (I know they’re far away really) then a week in Indonesia, moving north through Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and then Japan. If the Fulbright doesn’t work out, then we can spend longer in each place and be more leisurely. I’d love to go to China and see the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall too-it’s always been a dream of mine.
-sf
This was a year for rain. June was wet and cool for much of the month and I couldn’t even get things planted until much later than I like to. I forwent the walls o’ water this year because laziness and it ended up being a complete blessing. People who planted in May saw their entire gardens washed away by rain and hail. Early June when I finally got everything planted here’s what it looked like:
June 10
Compare that to the pictures I took in June a few years ago and you can see how behind things were this year. Nevertheless, like I said things grew as they do and now I again have a small jungle.
September 14
Thus far we’ve had good tomatoes, squash, eggplant, broccoli, a few peppers, basil, tomatillos & carrots, but NOTHING like last year where I just didn’t know what to do with all the produce. I’m not sure if I’ll have enough to can this year, but the big Roma plants haven’t ripened yet and as they’re determinant tomatoes they all ripen at the same time so I might be able to make a few batches for sauce over winter.
This year the kids had their own little plot in the front which they were responsible for choosing, planting and caring for over the year. They’ve done a good job with it and it was delightful to see them full of pride when they would wrest carrots from the ground or check on the peppers for just the right redness to eat!
It’s getting colder now and I’m watching temperatures near daily-soon will be a frost where I will have to pick everything or try and use sheets to cover the plants for a night.
I’m sad that next year with the travels I won’t have a garden. It’ll be the first time in several years. I’ve realized that the garden gives me a sense of real seasonality. From the moment I first plant in the ground, usually mid March, winter is over for me and I no longer want to go snowboarding even though there’s plenty of snow in the mountains. And somewhere around October when the mornings are cool with just a bit of bite, I realize that summer’s really over and I stop wanting to do anything with the garden and let it fall into decay. The rhythm of life and seasons which is so settled for me here will be turned upside down starting next summer, and while there’s an excitement to that and a knowledge of growth, there’s also a wistful feeling of missing what is normal and standard and regular and familiar.
tomatillo, bright in the morning sun
aerial view of tomatillo
brightness in the green
4 things I love about school are 1 . my friends 2 . my classroom 3 .my playground 4 .my teacher !
-lb
Do you like school? I don’t. My class mates are loud, mean,and hold up class. Now let’s move on to the happier things – like that I finished 2 books bigger than the Lost Hero . They are the School of Good and Evil. They are very good books. My favorite character is Hester. She goes to the school of Evil but does a lot of good deeds.
-hf
This is one of my favorite parts of a trip, where you start looking through different travel guides and see how much delightful things there are to see and do around the world. It’s full of possibility and imagination and delight, and has none of the pesky realities of cost and actually getting there.
I’ve thus far just focused on the Japan books, since that will be the first part of the trip. Or…maybe not. As I’ve just learned, August is intolerably humid through most of Japan, with humidity up to 80% on many days. Unfortunately, we don’t really have the flexibility to go there in, say, April when it’s truly lovely given the school schedule.
August is also a heavy travel month in Japan given that it’s their summer vacation too and it’s also time of the Obon festival so we’ll have to make some more plans in advance since the Japanese are traveling also! One thought I had is to start with a week or so in Vancouver. We’ve never been and would love to go, August is pleasant in Vancouver, and flights there are surprisingly cheap and flights TO Tokyo are also fairly inexpensive! Another idea is to spend time in the mountains or Hokkaido first where it’s cooler and more nature-y.
Reading about Japan is so fun-whether it’s learning about the Studio Ghibli museum, tasty ramen, the outdoor hot springs (where many ban tattoos as they are considered tied to the Yakuza!), delicious sushi, the tons of fireworks festivals throughout August, the temples, yummy udon, Ninja training academies, all the crazy Harajuku outfits, Tokyo Disney and shabu-shabu. Did I mention the food?
It’s also really nice that all the prices are listed in Yen and I have no idea how much that is at this point. Sure, I could plug it through a converter but where’s the fun in that? Right now there’s so many zeros it all seems ridiculous! I’m going to live in that world for a bit. Besides, we’re not doing this as a shoestring trip-while I don’t want to be spendthrift, we do have the luxury of not needing to spend only $50 a day and I know we’ll be able to make up for it in Southeast Asia and India.
And it’s fun to be able to look at thing that I wouldn’t be able to look at without traveling with kids. By which I mean, I would normally be somewhat bashful about wanting to visit Tokyo Disney or a Sanrio store or the Ninja training but hey, if the KIDS are clamoring for it, who am I to stand in their way, right?
Anyone who’s been there have some must see sights, possibly off the beaten path?
-s
It’s time to start really thinking about the trip for next year. I mean really, really thinking about it.
Which induces not only excitement and happiness and gratitude and amazement and also complete paralyzing anxiety and panic. As wonderful as I know the trip will be, it also just feels SO BIG to think about. There’s all the big things to think about–what do we do with the house, the cars, school, safety, money, where we will go–and then when I’m done worrying about that I start to think about all the little things. Things such as what to pack and what we’re going to eat and will we have cell phones and is it okay for me to bring mascara on this trip? Or does that make me a bad traveler? Or just one who looks a bit better in pictures?
Some of the big things-we’d like to rent the house out, though haven’t entirely ruled out selling it, we’ll be selling one of the cars and probably having a friend keep the other. School is a bit trickier but with some combination of online math/science and using the trip itself for social studies, history and reading/writing I think it’ll be manageable.
As far as where we’ll go, I’ve gotten a stack of books from the library to start researching the first leg of the trip, which will be Japan and Southeast Asia. I’m thinking to start in Japan, then fly down to Vietnam and explore the peninsula. I’m not sure about visiting China, but it all depends on how much time we have and how much anyone who’s been there convinces me we HAVE to go. The second leg depends on whether Eric gets the Fulbright Scholarship he’s applied for in Timisoara, Romania or not. If so we’ll be there from perhaps October through December, and likely do some exploring of Eastern Europe at that time. If not then we’ll likely do longer stops in East Asia. December/January ideally we’d spend 3-4 weeks in India, then in February we’d head to Ireland where Eric is teaching a Study Abroad program near Dublin. During or after that time we’ll travel in Western Europe. Nothing of course has been set in stone, and if there’s someplace that you tell me we MUST go to, we can change our trip.
Overall we’re planning a slow travel type of a trip, where we find a rental for 1-2 weeks in a place and then do day trips from there instead of moving every day. I’ve been reading some family travel blogs and this seems to be what works best especially when traveling with kids. It also gives us the ability to have a more relaxing down day in the week where we plan the week, do homework, etc.
I’d like to be better about documenting this trip, so my goal is to start writing on at least a weekly basis to get in the habit of doing so. It’s surprisingly easy to find time NOT to write, as those of you who write well know, and I hope that by making it a priority now it’s easier to continue when we’re on the road.
So here we begin!
-s
fretzes on the loose 