I’m always doing that: thinking of what we were doing this time last year. I’m also looking ahead and feeling anxious — excited, but nervous — about what we’ll be doing one year from now.

People ask all the time, “How are you doing? All settled back in?” That’s tough to answer. I usually say, “We’re doing well but still transitioning. We’re back home but not exactly settled.”

I wish I could either blog about new destinations or write a nice, tidy epilogue to the story of our trip. But we don’t have any noteworthy travel planned, and the story of what the trip meant and how it changed us is still developing.

So I want to share what we’re up to these days, and then, with some sadness and until further notice, mothball this blog. I hope the day will come when I have reason to give it a makeover and launch an encore edition.

Still having fun: Last week, Morgan and I got into the spirit of an '80s-prom theme party.

Morgan and I are working from home together (“work” broadly defined). I love having him here during the day; my concern that we’d clash while trying to be productive under the same roof proved unfounded. He’s in the process of developing ideas and networking with others to secure independent work that combines legal strategy and case preparation with design and multimedia. He’s also more involved in the community and found himself stuffing envelopes the other day for a fundraiser, the only dad in a cluster of moms. I hope he can arrive at something professionally that engages both his intellectual and artistic talents, and that also preserves the flexibility and work-life balance he appreciates so much.

I’m dividing my time writing, volunteering, running and, of course, parenting. I miss homeschooling the kids — not day in and day out, but frequently — and I get inordinately excited when they ask for help with homework, or when I spy an opportunity to enhance their regular lessons in some way. I’m doing a variety of satisfying things volunteering as a parent and an alumna, and I recently began donating time as an editor to help a cool group of women on a project to chronicle working life in America. I’m running a lot and excited about my first 50-mile race this weekend (details in my running blog).

But the main thing I’m working on — the biggest, scariest thing — is a book. A travelogue or a practical guide to long-term family travel would feel fairly manageable to produce, but I’m attempting something more personal (and hence way more difficult): a memoir about adopting a stripped-down, nomadic lifestyle and running around the globe to try to find the peace of mind and passion that kept eluding us back home. It’s about what happened and how we all changed when we took quality time to the extreme and used travel as an extension of therapy to shore up our marriage, bond as a family and re-evaluate our direction in life. Please wish me luck — I’ll need it. I’ve barely started and am hitting the wall in Mile 2 of this marathon.

Morgan and I have “no regrets,” as the tagline to this blog says. We need only look at the photos from the trip, or recognize how we work as equal partners with the kids and function as a foursome in a way we never did before 2009, to say with conviction that the year away changed us for good.

But it’s not easy to give up the status and stability that went with the law firm partnership Morgan relinquished, or to dive naked into the ocean of a book project with no buoy of confidence that it’s a story I can adequately tell — or even if I could, that it would get published. The structure, salary and built-in social network of a regular job tempt us at times, as when we bump into each other in the kitchen midday, dressed as though it were the weekend, and wonder out loud, “What exactly are we doing today — and with the rest of our lives?” But for now we’d rather feel unsettled, in all senses of the word — lacking stability, worried and uneasy, liable to change, not yet paid — than settled back in a routine that was slowly extinguishing him and spoiling me. “Gotta try new things,” as Morgan said repeatedly on the trip.

And how are the kids settling in?

Kyle and Colly, with our dog Teddy, leaving home for the first day of school.

I was so worried about how Colly would manage the transition to 7th grade, given the middle school’s heavy academic load and melodramatic social scene. Imagine going from 6th grade on the road — having one-on-one instruction, no homework, a flexible schedule, a pass-fail grading system, the world as the classroom — to 7th grade at the big middle school, where she sits in classes as one of 25 to 40, has two hours of homework nightly, tests with letter grades weekly, and hundreds of peers who got to know each other during the past year when she was away. Then, imagine having two kneecap dislocations over the summer, which necessitated a complicated surgery during the second week of school. That’s what Colly faced last month — and she responded like a world traveler. She is rising to meet the academic challenges and handling her load with more independence and aplomb than I could have hoped. She’s fitting in socially and developing hobbies, like cooking and film editing, to make up for the fact she’s hobbled by crutches. The love of reading that blossomed during the trip is still blooming — we have to enforce lights-out or she’ll stay up until midnight to finish more chapters.

I wasn’t worried about Kyle’s transition because he loved school in grades K-2 and gets along well with almost anyone, but he had a surprisingly hard time adapting to 4th grade. On a couple of occasions he teared up and his chin quivered with emotion when he asked if I could please homeschool him again. The classroom’s size (27 students), the teacher’s necessary emphasis on rules, and a relentless schedule of back-to-back assignments all combined to shock a boy who grew accustomed to learning at his own pace with individualized instruction and to following his curiosity down paths that deviated from a schedule. So much of his learning last year involved going places and experiencing things, it’s not surprising that he’s happiest with school subjects based on doing and touching: PE, science and instrumental music. He’s adjusting, but it saddens me that he now views school as something to endure. We’re trying to help by giving him a lot of free time at home. Whereas most of his peers do soccer, swim team or flag football nearly every afternoon and their weekends revolve around team games, Kyle does nothing after school but skateboarding, guitar, reading and homework.

As a family, we’re not as close as we were during the ten months on the road, but we’re communicating and getting along better than before the trip. We’re cooking a lot more and spending a lot less. The four of us eat together for breakfast and dinner, and we huddle around the TV to watch the shows we’re collectively hooked on (Master Chef, Glee, Project Runway and Modern Family). Morgan is just as likely as I am to pick up the kids, go to the grocery store, and deal with annoying things like plumbing repairs and insurance paperwork — the kinds of things he rarely used to do. I am still the one to pick up the dog’s piles on the lawn, but he mows it with a hand-push mower. (Getting rid of the mow-and-blow crew was one of the things we did to save a bit of money and help the environment.)

I was startled to see pumpkins at a pumpkin patch yesterday because we skipped the autumn season last year; we left Colorado right after the equinox and hit South America at the start of spring. I’m looking forward to buying some pumpkins to decorate our front porch, and to raking the liquid amber’s crimson leaves from our front garden. I’ll look for a pumpkin recipe to bake with Colly during our weekly cooking date. For these reasons and lots more, it’s good to be home — but I nonetheless feel pangs of longing when I flash back to that grocery store in Patagonia, on a day when a surprise spring snowstorm in the Andes foothills frosted blossoms with white. I searched the aisles in vain for canned zapallo to make a pumpkin pie and resorted to dulce de leche instead. This week, on second thought, I think I’ll find a recipe for empanadas.

“Away Together” was about going away together, and about finding a way together as a couple and as a family. Many, many thanks to all of you who were regular readers of this blog. I sometimes felt as if I were writing into a black hole and became convinced that our stories didn’t pass the “who cares?” test, but then your supportive comments came back and boosted my spirits tremendously. So long for now!

Related posts:

1. Playing Around Rotorua
2. “Back to School” Becomes “Leave to Learn”
3. When It Rains…

After 10 months of family travel, I don’t have a comprehensive packing list to share (here’s a good one for starters if that’s what you’re looking for), but I can detail some of the gear and clothing we found indispensable. A lot of essential items seem obvious, so I left them off this list; e.g., our Mac laptops, photography equipment, running shoes, and the iPhone to which we’re truly addicted. (We had the iPhone unlocked and replaced the SIM card in every country to get a local phone number and GPS, which is a pain but doable — and worth it.) Instead, I listed personal favorites that travelers might not think to pack.

I also listed useful supplies for “roadschooling,” and finally a few items we could have left at home — things we brought because we thought we should, but it turned out we didn’t need them.

For families heading off for long summer trips or sabbaticals, I hope this helps make your packing job easier. For those of you who’ve traveled for long stretches of time, please add your tips on what or what not to pack in the comments below.

Can’t Imagine Traveling Round the World Without These:

Colly and me catching a train to Venice with our Osprey Porter packs on back and our daypacks (with laptop holders built in) on front.

Osprey Porter Packs: After months of having this luggage virtually grafted to our sides, it’s hard to imagine life without our Osprey convertible packs. They held up great — no busted zippers or other malfunctions — and we found them comfortable and well-designed. I loved being able to pull out the straps and carry mine on my back when need be; then I’d tuck the straps back in to make it more of a duffel bag when checking it on board. Morgan and I each got the Osprey Porter 90and for Colly we got the smaller Porter 65. For Kyle, we went with a rolling convertible backpack, the Osprey Sojourn 22.Note: I am a firm believer in not using suitcases with wheels, since the wheel frame adds significant weight and you end up having to pick the bag up frequently to carry up stairs anyway. (The very useful site onebag.com has a good discussion on “Wheeled Bags and Other Bad Ideas.”) But Kyle was too small to carry his, so we got one with wheels so he could pull it. We also used an old, small Tumi suitcase with wheels as a “mobile office” filled with books and gear. I hated that clunky, heavy suitcase and wish we could have done without it.

REI Travel Document Organizer: We use this 6″x10″ case to hold our passports and extra credit cards and money. I carried it with my laptop pack, which I always kept in hand or looped around my leg while sitting, until we reached our lodging, and then I’d lock it in the safe (or hide it in folded clothing when no safe was available). I believe in hiding passports and extra credit cards and money with belongings left in the locked room rather than carrying those essential documents while sightseeing because pickpocketing or car break-ins seem more likely than room thefts. When we walked around, we carried only a driver’s license for ID and one credit card so that in case of theft or loss we’d have to cancel only one card. The document organizer made it easy to keep these things together and hide them.

Black Fleece Pullover and Rain Shell: Since I had only a few outfits that I wore repeatedly, I learned to dress in layers for warmth and to wear black as much as possible so dirt won’t show. I dressed up outfits and added color with scarves but basically lived in my black fleece pullover (and a few T-shirts made of high-tech synthetic fabric that dries easily and won’t wrinkle). The kids and I all had waterproof shells rather than thick coats, and they were warm enough for almost-freezing temps when coupled with the fleece underneath and gloves. Morgan decided to bring a thicker waterproof jacket and ended up glad he did, even though it’s fairly heavy, since it’s so versatile  and dressy enough to wear out. In Barcelona, I finally broke down and bought a thicker, dressier jacket to look more fashionable in European cities, but it felt like a luxury rather than essential, and I had to get rid of other clothes to make room in my pack for it.

These are the jackets I recommend, seen here when we're in the cold of Patagonia last October. I'm also carrying the Eagle Creek packable daypack recommended below.

Kindles:We love our Kindles! We started out with two and ended up getting a third, plus we use the Kindle iPhone app for another reading device. Given all the reading we did on the trip, it was a godsend to have a lightweight reading device in lieu of heavy books, and to be able to easily purchase books in non-English-speaking countries. The iPhone Kindle app was particularly useful for travel guides; several times in Italy, for example, we downloaded a Rick Steves guide to a particular city, and we’d refer to it on the iPhone while getting around town and touring a site.

My pack with some of the compression clothing sacks pulled out.

Eagle Creek Compression Sacks:The plastic bags are like giant Ziplocks that come in small, medium and large sizes to hold clothing. You pack your clothes in and squeeze the air out to make the clothes as compact as possible; plus, they work as organizers so you can separate your clothes into different sets rather than having them all jumbled together in the bag.

Swiss Army Knife: I’m amazed by how many times we ate out of cans and used our Swiss Army knife for opening them, or used it for myriad other purposes. I’m also amazed by how many times I forgot that it was in my carry-on bag and it got through airport security anyway.

Our lovely braided rubber clothesline, strung between two chairs in the sun and doing its job.

Braided Rubber Clothesline:We washed clothes in the sink once a week on average, and this little clothesline came in handy every time. It’s designed so you can hang several pieces of clothing from it, rather than just a few pieces draped over. We also stocked up on individual packets of hand-wash laundry detergent.

Headlamp:A lot of packing lists say to bring a flashlight, but I say get a headlamp instead! A couple of times we were in places where the power went out at night, and it was reassuring to have a headlamp so that both hands were free. Also, since the four of us often shared a single room, one of us could use the headlamp as a reading light when the others wanted to sleep.

Shoe Tag ID:Any time I go off on my own to run, I make sure I have this ID tag on my shoe so that if, heaven forbid, I were hit by a car or in some other accident, then I wouldn’t be a Jane Doe. What I like about this new generation of interactive tags from Road ID is that you can update the contact info online, so that emergency responders can go online or call a phone number on the tag to get your medical and contact info and then contact loved ones. This is particularly useful for travel when your contact info frequently changes. I also got two of the company’s dog-tag IDs for the kids to wear around their necks on travel days, in case we got separated in airports or big cities and they couldn’t communicate with authorities about their personal contact info.

Portable External Hard Drive: Prepare for the likelihood your laptop will get stolen or broken during travel. We backed up ours weekly with the Western Digital My Passport for Mac and made sure to pack the hard drive in a separate bag from the laptop carrier.

Really Handy Extras:

GoLite Mini Rain Shell: This paper-thin but powerful windbreaker folds up and stuffs into a pocket-size, ultra-lightweight triangle. I took it with me running and sightseeing frequently, just in case I needed an extra layer. It’s amazing how one thin layer provides so much wind and rain protection. I couldn’t find a link for it online, but the GoLite site (a great company for lightweight adventure gear) might offer it again or something similar.

Running with my GoLite rain shell in the Lake District of Argentina. This jacket weighs only a few ounces and folds into a pocket.

Eagle Creek Packable Daypack:This thin lightweight daypack folds up into a pocket-sized pouch. I liked it better than regular, heavier daypacks for hikes and sightseeing, and it was useful to have another bag to carry things like groceries.

Cheap Plastic Flip-Flops: I bought some in New Zealand when we stayed in lots of campsites with communal showers. They’re useful to slip on and wear in showers with icky floors.

Scissors: We use the scissors in our homeschooling kit all the time. I also brought along high-quality hair cutting scissors to cut Kyle’s and Morgan’s hair from time to time.

Portable Power Strip:We used this small power strip to increase the number of outlets in our lodging to accommodate our laptops. Coupled with the Apple World Traveler Adapter Kit, we could power up anywhere.

Roadschooling Essentials:

I’m listing some of our schooling supplies because they can be useful for family travel even if you’re not doing school on the go.

Pencil Box with Supplies: We have a 5″x12″ hard plastic pencil case that contains pretty much all the supplies the kids need: pencils and sharpeners, scissors, markers, paper clips, ruler and protractor, PostIts, tape, dice and playing cards. The only thing that doesn’t fit in it that we also use a lot: a stapler.

Small White Boards with Dry Erase Markers: We have three 9″x12″ white boards and use them constantly for lessons, especially math problems. They cut down on the need for scratch paper.

E-versions of Books: Most of the kids’ schoolbooks are online or in PDF form. We got login access for their math and science texts, so they can read them online. Colly’s history book publisher didn’t have an online version, so we purchased the book, removed the binding, and took it to a copy story to have the whole thing scanned as a PDF. (Halfway through our trip, however, I decided to get and carry her heavy math book because I was unhappy with the online interface, and our Internet connections were spotty and expensive.) We got most of their books for pleasure reading in Kindle format. We supplemented their e-books with online resources, our favorite being Brain Pop. I can’t say enough about how fantastic Brain Pop is, and it provided a great substitute for TV.

Mobile Scanner:This lightweight gadget is only 11″x2″. We scanned and sent a lot of their work to their long-distance teachers, and this scanner also came in handy a few times when we needed to scan something for personal business.

Journals and Paper: Even though the kids used the laptops daily, good ol’ paper and pencil were still the best for creative writing and drawing. We also brought graph paper for math.

Things We Thought We Had To Bring And Never Used:

Travel Towel: Every place we rented — even the RV — provided towels and other linens. Unless you’re camping the whole time or staying in hostels where no towels are provided, don’t bother bringing a towel.

Toiletry Kit for Carry-On: For the first few months when we flew, I’d include a toiletry kit with our essentials in my carry-on bag in case our luggage got lost. I never used these travel-size duplicates of things in our main toiletry kit, and it ended up being clutter we didn’t need. Keep in mind that unless you’re traveling to a very remote area, essential medicines and pharmacy supplies can be purchased pretty much anywhere.

Guidebooks and Maps: All the info you need is available in e-book format, from websites and from tourist info offices in destinations. Leave the heavy books at home.

Sink Stopper: Why is this on all packing lists? We brought one and never used it, even though we always did laundry in the sink. A plug was always available, or we could have plugged it up with a washcloth.

Final words of advice: Travel light so you can easily carry all of your belongings!

Kyle and Colly packed and carried all their own stuff for the year.

So many times we had to run to catch a train or squeeze into a small cab, and each time we expressed relief that we didn’t have more luggage. It really is possible to live out of a couple of small bags. Plus, there’s the added benefit of teaching our children (and ourselves) to be more self-reliant and less materialistic. The less you bring to carry, the happier you’ll be on the go.

Related posts:

1. When It Rains…
2. How To Plan A Year-Long Family Travel Itinerary
3. One Year Later: The Time-Capsule Travel Letters and the ‘Eat Pray Love’ Backlash

Lauterbrunnen

Over the past few days, we’ve glimpsed Switzerland at its prettiest and most poetic (which is such a relief after the stormy sky and mercurial moods detailed in the previous post).

Standing under Staubbach Falls.

The drive from Lucerne to Interlaken revealed alpine beauty that rivals even the Colorado Rockies and New Zealand’s Southern Alps. We checked into a cozy family room in a friendly little hotel, aptly named Hotel Splendid, and immediately headed out to explore before rain returned.

I’ve never seen as many waterfalls as we saw on the drive to Lauterbrunnen, a small town seven miles up the valley from the better-known Interlaken. “Lauter brunnen” means “many fountains” or “loud wells,” and there are 72 of them in and around town.  The waterfalls stream over sharp cliffs colored with alternating shades of dark and light gray, and then they’re swallowed by swaths of forests where the lighter green of new growth contrasts with the darker evergreens.

We stood in a meadow under Lauterbrunnen’s beloved Staubbach Falls, all of us feeling warmed by the sun and awed by the stream of mist floating down in the wind. I thought the moment couldn’t get any better, but then it did, because we saw a little plaque that indicated we once again were following in Goethe’s footsteps. He visited this spot in 1779 and was inspired to write the poem Spirit Song Over the Waters, which we read and discussed right there at the base of the falls until Kyle ran off to chase some sheep. (The next day Kyle wrote in his journal about the beauty of the waterfalls and concluded, “But most of all I love the mountains. They give me ideas for my mind.” I agree!)

After days of rain and indoor time, Kyle was so happy to run around here.

Overall, we really enjoyed Interlaken; I only wish the town could demolish its tacky modern high-rise hotels that look utterly out of place against the charming historic cottages done in quintessential Swiss-German architecture. The town’s original buildings look like they’re lifted from a Hansel and Gretle storybook, all woodsy and decorated with patterned carvings and stenciled paintings.

German is the dominant language in this region, but as is the case everywhere in Switzerland, we heard multiple languages and tasted a variety of cuisines. Our favorite meal was at a surprisingly authentic Mexican restaurant, El Azteca, where the Portuguese twentysomething waiter spoke so many different languages to the diners around us that I finally asked him (in Spanish) how many languages he speaks. He said six, as though it were no big deal (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English)! One thing I love about Switzerland: It has solidified the kids’ desire to study a second language in school, which before this trip they had groaned about as though it would be an endless chore.

A well-marked trail network branches out through the valley, and Morgan and I left the kids alone in the hotel room one morning to run together (which we only do when we feel certain it’s a safe place, with someone we trust at the receptionist desk available to help in case of emergency). We ran a path back toward Lauterbrunnen and once again marveled at the views — until a cloudburst drenched us with rain so freezing that we turned back. Well, the sun was nice while it lasted!

Morgan on our rainy run. No wonder the grass is so green and the waterfalls are so full around here -- it's really wet!

After Interlaken, we crossed over to the French part of Switzerland and settled on the north side of Lake Geneva. We checked into a terrific apartment in the town of Montreux, about a half hour from Lausanne, and rejoiced to be in a rental with a kitchen again. We have stayed in too many hotels recently and therefore celebrated the opportunity to cook simple meals and avoid overpriced restaurants. The apartment overlooks the lake and has a playground in front.

Our apartment building in Montreux isn't terribly pretty ...

... but the view from its balconey sure is.

The kids quickly made friends with three siblings (who are completely trilingual — German, French and English) from the apartment below us. We met their parents, who invited us down for dinner, and it was such a treat to get to meet some locals.

One morning, after the kids hit their schoolbooks for about an hour and a half, we gathered around the laptop to learn about the history of Chateau de Chillon and to read Lord Byron’s poem The Prisoner of Chillon. The castle is just a mile away from the apartment, so we packed a picnic and set off walking along the lakeside trail to spend much of the afternoon exploring the medieval masterpiece. We’ve visited many castles along the way, but this was the best restored and had wonderful displays enhanced with period furniture and artifacts.

Morgan called up, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel!" when he took this shot of me in one of Chillon's towers.

Byron’s words — written in 1816 after he imagined how the prisoner Bonivard must have felt during his six years chained to a pillar there during the 1530s — came to life as we poked around the dungeon. Morgan excerpted lines from the poem for captions to some of the photos in this slideshow (click the play button, then the “full screen” icon in the bottom right corner, then the “show info” tab in the upper right corner to read them).

This is turning out to be a great week not only for seeing Switzerland, but also for homeschooling. I’ve been meaning to write a followup to our early post on homeschooling, since families planning similar long-term trips have been asking about how we do it, how many hours a day the kids spend on school, and that sort of thing. I’ll try to write it soon, but suffice to say that their learning is intertwined with travel more than ever and is difficult to quantify because learning happens all the time, wherever we go. We managed to strike what feels like a good balance between sitting indoors and working through their core curriculum, and going outside to learn more spontaneously and experientially.

Speaking of which, right now we’re headed to the Musee d’Alimentarium, a food museum in neighboring Vevey that explores the history and politics of food production as well as the science of nutrition and food digestion. It may not inspire poetry, but likely will be food for thought!

A statue of Charlie Chaplin gazes at a giant fork in the water outside Vevey's food museum. As we often say during this trip, "That's something you don't see every day."

Related posts:

1. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
2. When It Rains…
3. Playing Around Rotorua

If you arrive at St. Peter's Square at sunrise, you're rewarded with a view of this ...

... and this.

I know, it’s incredible to be able to say not only that we started the day with the Pieta, but also, “I was running laps around the Circus Maximus.” The circus is a half-mile oval track in a dirt and grassy area where Julius Caesar and subsequent emperors through the 4th century used to come down from their palaces on the adjacent Palatine Hill and join tens of thousands of spectators to watch chariot races. Only a few remnants of the starting gates remain, but it’s easy to imagine the thundering hooves and wheels picking up speed on the straight-aways and the brutish drivers who struggled to keep their balance in the bumpy carts, sometimes crashing and dying on the curves.

That’s one of the best things about being here in Rome: I really can picture the ancient people who no longer seem so ancient and better understand how they went about their lives.

On our first day, we explored the remnants on Palatine Hill, in between the Forum and Circus Maximus, to find clues about the everyday lives of ancient Romans.

But Rome does not reward the visitor easily. Rome Fatigue sets in within 24 hours, the symptoms being a throbbing head, aching feet and a defensive stance toward others. My elbows stick out to navigate crowds while my hand grips my bag to prevent theft. I cram info from guidebooks and try to interpret it for Colly and Kyle, whose eyes glaze over after a couple of hours — their heads are spinning from learning about the Renaissance 500 years ago and the Republic 1500 years before that (which makes Paul Revere’s house that we visited in Boston a year ago seem virtually modern). At least we are blessed with beautiful weather; I definitely would not want to visit during the worst of the summer’s heat and crowds.

The antidote to the fatigue is good food, lodging and company, and we’ve been blessed with all three. We’re sharing the week with Morgan’s parents, and it’s delightful to spend time with them here. We combined resources to rent a top-floor apartment with a rooftop patio overlooking the Coliseum, which is an ideal place to unwind and contemplate the tired but true saying, “In Rome, the past is always present.”

Morgan on the rooftop of our apartment with the Coliseum in the background.

For the kids, one of the best things about Rome was being with their grandparents!

I decided to make a list for would-be Rome travelers of some of the things that make Rome maddening, so that you’re forewarned, and other things that make it completely worthwhile:

• Rome Airport’s baggage claim: a perfect example of the city’s groaning inefficiency. Baggage from at least 10 different flights funnel onto each dirty, creaky carousel, and some of the bags have been popped open (by thieves? by customs? who knows) and spill clothes. Hordes of stressed travelers huddle around, blocking access or view of the carousel, so grabbing a piece off becomes a contact sport. Several separate companies handle the airport’s baggage operation, and as we waited an hour before glimpsing our packs, I spun theories on the rivalries, deals and kickbacks that must have developed the system and prevent it from streamlining.
• Queues and entrances to major sites: by 10 a.m., the lines to get in to see anything worthwhile stretch for blocks. Each place has multiple lines to multiple entrances, all of them tangled. You have to walk around, squeeze through clusters of tour groups and decipher clues from surrounding conversations to know if you’re standing in the right line because helpful signs in Rome are as scarce as public bathrooms.
  

  Big crowds and high prices are unavoidable around hot spots like Trevi Fountain.

• Price gouging near the tourist sites: Restaurants lure you in with delicious-looking panini that costs only 4 euros (about $5.40 US) for a big-sized sandwich, but they don’t list the price for drinks. When the bill comes, you discover that a skinny 10-ounce can of soda also costs 4 euros each and a small gelato costs 6 euros. We spent 56 euros ($75) on a simple lunch of two paninis, one cheese pizza and one salad because $26 went to buy three Diet Cokes and two Fantas. Thank goodness we skipped dessert.
• Traffic and street crossings: Most intersections go something like this: “Kids, hold my hands, get ready, now run! No, wait, aghhh — Jesus! Okay, now!”

And here’s why everyone should try to visit Rome at least once in their lifetime:

• St. Peter’s Basilica: Nothing prepared us for the size, scale and grandeur of The World’s Biggest Church. We got there when it opened at 7 a.m. to view it unhurried and uncrowded (a few hours later, lines stretched longer than a football field). It’s not just the Pieta that makes it worth a pilgrimage; it’s the frescoes, the palatial marble mosaic floors, the preserved 300-year-old Pope’s remains in view, the nearly 2000-year-old bronze statue of St. Peter whose toe has been rubbed off by a millenium of faithful kisses, the light and color and gold … it’s stunning.
  

  St. Peter's Basilica covers six acres and stretches two football fields from one end to the other.

  

  Michelangelo designed the dome when he was 71; others finished it after he died in 1564. It's 430 feet high. Each of those letters on the gold ribbon, which quote Jesus talking to St. Peter in the Bible, are 7 feet tall.

  Early-morning services were going on, reminding us we’re in a working church, not a museum. Our progressive Presbyterian kids, who are used to sitting cross-legged around a female pastor who plays guitar and sings folk tunes, watched wide-eyed as priests, nuns and altar boys genuflected and mumbled in Latin. Then we hustled out, walked about a half mile to the Vatican’s other side, bypassed lines already a quarter-mile long and entered at 8:30 a.m. with our pre-booked tickets. When in Rome, get up and go early.

• The Raphael Rooms and Sistine Chapel: I feel lame even attempting to describe their magnificence; all I can say is the experience brings learning to life and manages to condense the history of humankind into a few glorious rooms of frescoes.
  

  Our view of Raphael's School of Athens. That's Plato and Aristotle in the middle, and Plato (on the left) is painted with da Vinci's face. After the Pope let Raphael get a sneek peak at the Sistine Chapel, Raphael returned to the already-finished painting and added that brooding figure sitting on the steps with orange pants, which is Michelangelo as Heraclitus, aka "The Weeping Philosopher."

  We figured out who’s who in the School of Athens painting, speculated on the relationship between Raphael and Michelangelo, craned our necks up at the chapel’s panels, and were awestruck by the fearsome Last Judgment wall (which Michelangelo painted 23 years after the ceiling and which captures his growing disillusionment with the church and the Counter-Reformation). Kyle really admired the way Michelangelo painted his chief critic heading toward Hell naked and with a serpent wrapped around him, the snake’s head strategically positioned over private parts.

• The Vatican Museum before the Raphael Rooms and Sistine Chapel: I approached this unbelievably large warehouse of art with the wrongheaded attitude that we had to “get through it” to get to Raphael and Michelangelo. Boy am I glad we slowed down, as it was a fabulous collection that captured so much of what Colly has studied in her sixth-grade Ancient History book over the past six months. We saw writing tablets circa 2500BC that were a hallmark of the Sumerians’ civilization, Egyptian coffins and mummies, and Greek and Roman sculpture that inspired the Renaissance greats.
  

  It's a special day when you get to say, "No climbing on the sarcophagus, kids."

• The Arch of Titus: Out of all the ancient ruins we’ve toured (which is a lot), this one arch — the oldest extant one in Rome, built in AD81 — held my attention perhaps more than any others. Its reliefs honor a terrible moment in history: when Titus led the Roman army to Jerusalem in the year 70 to put down the Jewish Revolt, sack their riches and sacred objects, and destroy their great temple (the Western Wall, aka Wailing Wall, is what remains). The Romans then used the stolen money and slave labor to build more of their great city.
  

  A detail from the Arch of Titus in the Forum. It was built one year after the Coliseum and is about 50 feet high.

  

  Here I am trying to explain it to Kyle. He liked how some of the details looked like architectural details on Piedmont homes.

  It’s fascinating to see the aesthetic details of the arch — for example, an S-shaped corbel with decorative patterns that reminds me of the carved corbels of our own house — and to feel drawn to the Romans who made it, but on the other hand be appalled by the brutality and injustice of their empire. Likewise, the Coliseum stirred in me both admiration for their engineering feats and disgust for their bloody entertainment.

  

  You might say the Coliseum is bloody brilliant.

• Authentic, slow-cooked regional cuisine: Since we don’t speak Italian and we’re in a tourist-oriented spot, it took some work to find a special, locals’-favorite restaurant, but we did. I highly recommend Il Bocconcino, right around the corner from our apartment on Via Ostilia, for anyone looking for a meal near the Coliseum.

I think I’ll stop before I inflict Rome Fatigue on any readers patient enough to stick this far. We leave Rome and take a train for Venice on Monday. Here’s a slide show of Morgan’s Rome photos (if you play it, I encourage you to click the icon on the bottom right corner of the flickr screen to enlarge to full screen view). Colly’s photos follow below.

Colly took her own photos and did her own slide show! Be sure to enlarge it to full screen, then click the “show info” option in top right corner to see her captions. Ciao for now!

Related posts:

1. A Typical Atypical Travel Day
2. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
3. Snapshots of Venezia and Treviso

The Sydney skyline as seen from a ferry.

As you can guess from the photo, we’ve started the five-week Australian leg of our journey! This past week was a blur as I left Morgan and the kids for a short trip back to California. The three of them transitioned from New Zealand to here, and I rejoined them midweek.

I felt the way this guy looks after I crossed the date line twice in a week. Morgan and the kids saw this koala at the Sydney Zoo.

At first I felt as bushed as a koala who looks drunk on eucalyptus midday. (Little-known fact from Friends of the Koalas: “Contrary to popular belief, eucalyptus leaves do not make koalas drunk. Koalas appear drunk or lazy because they have developed a low-energy lifestyle to compensate for their extremely low-energy diet.” What a bummer to discover — I liked the idea that this lovable species had evolved to be fat, lazy and perpetually buzzed.)

In the midst of the past week, each of us took time to mark the halfway point in our journey by doing the following exercise: write a letter to ourselves and the other family members. Reflect on the trip so far, making note of what memories stand out and our feelings about the past six months. Then imagine the second half of the journey (when we’ll go from Australia to Hong Kong, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey) and write down some hopes and expectations for those months. Don’t share the letter with anyone yet; seal it up and set it aside. Then, on the last night before returning home, open and take turns reading them to one another and reflecting further — not only about where we went and what we did, but also why we did it, how it affected us and what we’ll do next.

I have my friend Carolyn to thank (the one who hosted us in Queenstown, who’s an accomplished educator and world traveler) for suggesting this exercise, because it prompted me to think more deeply about how this trip has changed and surprised us. There’s no way I can fit all those ideas into a blog post, but I’d like to share some.

Here, then, are some surprises and revelations  in no particular order:

I really like my family. This wasn’t obvious to me before. Of course I love them — but did I like their company so much that I could spend all day, every day with them? As we planned this trip in early 2009, I seriously worried we would get sick of each other. I braced for the inevitability that we would bicker and get in one another’s way. What happened instead is they became my closest friends. We do bicker (that really is inevitable), but nonetheless I am happiest when we are sharing small spaces, such as a car or a hotel room, and when they are in sight or earshot. This is one reason I don’t miss our big house with its separate areas. Back home I occasionally found myself thinking “I need my space” or “my kids are driving me crazy,” but those thoughts don’t enter my head now.

Colly and Kyle are de facto BFFs. They’re reluctant to admit it, but the kids have developed a bond and have more fun together than ever before (see the earlier post on how long-term travel affects play and sibling relationships).

We don’t need much stuff. Traveling has made us less materialistic, less cluttered and more frugal. We have pared down to the essentials, and we value every item in our bags. I swear to God, nobody needs more than three pairs of shoes (sandals, running shoes, and close-toed leather shoes that are dressy but still good for walking around). We have purchased almost nothing as souvenirs, preferring to spend money on experiences and eating rather than on stuff. I look at price tags like never before and try to take home leftovers to make two meals out of one. We have to shop here in Sydney to replace some worn-out grubbies and to get some decent outfits for places like Barcelona and Rome, and the trip to the mall looms like a chore on our to-do list.

Kyle soaks in the Sydney Harbour scene. He's not the only one who's overdue for a haircut!

Related to the point above: We really don’t need all those toiletries and expensive skin and hair care products. I packed a mini-pharmacy when we left and discovered we didn’t need half the things we brought, and if we did need something, then we could buy a comparable product wherever we are. Brand loyalty faded quickly. My must-have conditioner from a salon ran out, and I replaced it with a product I had never heard of, at a mini-mart in Mendoza, for about one-tenth the cost, and my hair looked and felt pretty much the same. The idea of spending money to get my eyebrows and toenails done monthly now seems crazy. I recently wrote to a friend that these months of roadtripping have revived a latent hippie streak in Morgan and me, and we’re all overdue for haircuts.

I’m bigger. I weighed myself for the first time in months, and the scale confirmed what my tighter clothes and mirror told me: I’m enjoying the regional cuisine a little too much. I’ve got saddlebags that look well stocked for the long ride ahead. Lo que sea (whatever).

Long-term travel has leveled the playing field in our marriage. Morgan and I have a twenty-five year relationship with all the peaks, valleys and rocky terrain of a good trail run. These months away have helped our marriage in ways I didn’t expect, mainly because we’re more collaborative and united — we have to be, because we’re stuck together and need each other in these utterly foreign environments. We now work together on the essential things that often determine the (im)balance of power in a marriage, such as who controls the money, who cares for the house and who keeps the all-important calendar. The kids now look to their dad for answers and direction every bit as much or more than they come to me.  (One small example: Last night Colly asked me a question about makeup but went to Morgan for help with her hair.) Of course there’s still some division of labor — e.g. I do more than half of the homeschooling, he does more than half of the travel planning — but we trust one other to swap roles far more than we did before.

This notion hit me when I left them for my solo trip last week. I did not make multiple lists with endless reminders for Morgan about what he should do in my absence, and when he and the kids Skyped or emailed me details about their day, I did not second guess what they had or hadn’t done. I did not interrogate them about whether they were using sunscreen and flossing. I just felt happy for them and missed them. I trusted Morgan and respected him to a degree I know I wouldn’t have six months ago.

Morgan reading his Kindle in our Sydney apartment.

We’re reading books instead of the news. I’m guilty of political apathy. I’m not reading past many headlines. But I am reading — novels, memoirs, travel blogs — and savoring literature in a way I didn’t back home, where I had to deliberately make time to read just one book a month and my attention span shortened to article length. Morgan is reading about twice as much as I am, going off at least once during the day to read on his Kindle. And Colly and Kyle have become bookworms — they wander off and read, sometimes surreptitiously because they don’t want me to tell them to put away their books and get something else done. I truly doubt they would have discovered reading for pleasure back home, where reading is lumped together with homework and their time is so sliced and diced.

We’re not doing a lot of things we thought we’d do. Before we left, I had noble plans for various things we’d accomplish. I wanted to make a commitment to “voluntourism” — i.e., to volunteer for a worthy cause in each of our major destinations. I had images of the four of us pulling weeds in an organic farm in the countryside or handing out food at a soup kitchen in a city. None of that panned out. Volunteering takes time to set up, and takes time away from sightseeing, and quite frankly we have enough logistical wrinkles to iron out on a daily and weekly basis, so I let it go. I also wanted to attend a local church at least once a month, thinking it would be a good way to get a sense of the community we’re in, but we haven’t set foot in a church since we left the Bay Area (except to view the architecture). Like voluntourism, going to church felt like something we “should” do rather than really wanted to, so we let it go. Ditto with learning Italian (we started a “daily phrase” program but it petered out; I lost interest because it’s hard enough to study Spanish occasionally). And what about my fledgling career as a travel writer? Oh, yeah, I meant to get to that — I have all my notes from last year’s multimedia and travel writing seminars somewhere, along with ideas of stories to pitch to various websites and publications, and … well, this blog is about as far as I’ve gotten.

So far, no regrets. I wasn’t at all sure this trip would live up to the “no regrets” phrase in the blog’s tagline. The risks were huge: We jeopardized a career, strained relationships, risked our kids’ education and raided our savings. What if it all turned out to be a colossal mistake? What if we spent 11 months drifting around feeling homesick and anxious? What if we spent the whole time fighting? We had a long list of reasons not to leave home and go out on this longest of limbs. One thing that helped us make it happen was a refrain we heard from others who had taken time as a family for a similar trip: “It’s the best thing we ever did.” We heard it over and over, and now I’d say the same: It’s the best thing we ever did.

My favorite picture of the Sydney Opera House, courtesy of Colly.

Related posts:

1. Santiago’s Surprises
2. Sydney Wet and Wild
3. How To Plan A Year-Long Family Travel Itinerary

Trails like this (which is part of the Oparara Valley Track) crisscross the wet and wild West Coast.

I knew very little about the West Coast region of the South Island before we spent a week here, except for its reputation as rainy, buggy and rural. The average rainfall is 2575 mm (8.4 feet), and a sign at Abel Tasman National Park said, “You think the sand flies are bad here? Wait ’til you get to the West Coast!”

“At least you’ll miss the crowds over there,” a tour-guide type mentioned in a look-on-the-bright-side tone.

We detoured to the West Coast to participate in a low-profile trail running event (which I’ll write about next time), and we’re so glad we did. We have been blown away by the West Coast’s landscape — and not just ’cause it’s windy. This swath of New Zealand is gorgeous, authentic, unspoiled … and, yes, wet. Perhaps nowhere is New Zealand’s remarkable commitment to preserve open space and make it accessible with well-maintained trails more concentrated than in this region, which has five national parks and more “tracks” (what Kiwis call trails) than I could keep track of. For trail runners like us, it’s paradise.

The West Coast region covers some 375 miles of coastline, and its biggest district, Greymouth, has a population of less than 14,000. Almost half the West Coast residents live in and around Greymouth, while the others live in a sprinkling of sneeze-and-you’ll-miss-it towns populated mainly by coal miners, pub owners and shopkeepers. Imagine if you drove from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz and the biggest town were about the size of my hometown of Piedmont, and you begin to sense how sparsely populated the region is. Here are highlights from our far-flung tour:

Karamea

Oparara Arch, a 200m-long limestone tunnel carved over eons by the river, is one reason to visit Karamea.

Way, way out there, at the north end of the West Coast’s main road, is the funky farming community of Karamea, famous for caves in the Oparara Basin and gateway to the Kahurangi National Park and its 78K Heaphy Track (the longest of New Zealand’s amazing Great Walks). We drove up on a rainy day that obscured the views, wondering where the hell we were and what we were doing, and checked into The Last Resort motel, where the decor is dorm-room-circa-1985. (The lounge and restaurant are quite nice though, with a woodsy Big Sur kind of vibe.) The next day we put on our windbreakers and drove up a 10-mile dirt road with not another car in sight. The slick mud made the car fishtail, and again we wondered where the hell we were and nervously joked that it looked like we found ourselves in the place where Jurassic Park was filmed.

Finally we reached a trailhead with a brand-new picnic area surrounded by museum-quality informational boards describing the colorful history of logging and mining here. It also explained the science behind the cave and arch formation, and answered perplexing questions such as, Why is the river here the color of an amber ale? (Answer: tannins from the foliage stain the water, as though all the water were passing through a giant teabag.)

The river runs reddish-brown near Karamea, stained by tannins in the forest.

The kids took it all in and enthusiastically set off on a hike among fuzzy-green trees that Colly said looked Seussical. We all marveled at the porous mountain that drips like a sponge and the natural arches that sprout stalactites and stalagmites. (Roadschooling doesn’t get much better than this.)

One of the "Seussical" trees along the trail.

We had to crane our necks all the way back and look straight up to get this view of a natural limestone bridge over the trail.

Morgan and I didn’t make it onto the Heaphy Track, but we took turns running through rain forests and over bouncy suspension bridges along the 8-mile Oparara Valley Track, which opened in late 2008 after years of work and fundraising by local volunteers. I actually got teary eyed when I reached a hut in the woods midway on the trail, which the volunteers built as shelter for hikers and adorned with informational boards showing pictures of the crew building the track and camping in the woods. Someone had taken the time to carve a chair and matching ottoman out of a giant stump. The hut was so special and so secluded, so lovingly constructed, that it struck me as an unintended monument to Thoreau in that it invited anyone who had the spirit to delve into the woods to sit back and spend as long as possible contemplating Nature.

Charming Creek and Granity

Colly and Kyle learned about coal mining history along the 10K Charming Creek Track, which follows an old railroad bed through tunnels and past waterfalls. Rusted mining equipment is left along the way.

We stopped for a few nights in a place about an hour south of Karamea that’s a speck on the map, Ngakawau, which is next to Granity (which isn’t saying much). Our little inn, the Charming Creek B&B, was a great spot to stay — right across the street from a blustery beach — but only if you don’t mind being in an isolated area (we didn’t). We spent the days homeschooling and hiking along the beach and the Charming Creek Track, which follows the roaring Ngakawau River.

A piece of old iron along the Charming Creek trail by Mangatini Falls.

The West Coast tracks feature numerous suspension bridges like this one over the Ngakawau River. I found them scary, but Kyle and Colly loved bouncing across them.

The Charming Creek railroad tracks, which transported coal and logs for decades, now make a path for hikers and runners.

Westport

Cape Foulwind next to Westport (click to enlarge), as seen from The Bay House restaurant.

Westport is the only “big town” (pop. approx. 3000) in the north half of the West Coast. It’s a working-class community with the basics we needed (market, laundromat) but not much to offer in town itself. Outside of town, however, are more natural playgrounds.

We checked into a forgettable motel and then drove toward Cape Foulwind (which doesn’t actually smell bad) and stumbled upon the surprisingly sophisticated, Thai-influenced Bay House restaurant with an incredible view of waves crashing against the rocks at sunset. Anyone who’s anywhere near Westport should have a meal and walk around here.

The Bay House restaurant behind the big rock the kids climbed.

Westport sits at the base of the Buller Gorge, a spectacular river valley. (I know I’m overusing superlatives in this post, but I can’t help it!) We got up close to the river on horseback during a two-hour ride with Buller Adventure Tours. Having suffered through numerous nose-to-tail guided rides on bomb-proof horses, I was pleasantly surprised to find rental horses in good condition with high-quality tack and a guide who let us trot and canter. At one point, we forged a sizable creek (not Buller River itself, which is much bigger than the stream in these photos).

Kyle manage to ride English by himself and guide his reluctant pony through the creek.

Colly took her horse through the deepest part and got her jeans soaked!

Now we’re headed to the southern half of the West Coast — between Westport and Greymouth — to explore places like Pancake Rocks and the Croesus Crossing before heading over Arthur’s Pass to Queenstown. Today marks the five-month day of our journey, approximately the halfway mark of our trip if we return in June as planned, and I can’t believe how far we’ve come.

Thanks to Morgan for taking these great photos ...

... and thanks to the kids for being great hikers!

Related posts:

1. In the Backwoods of Blackball, Not Your Typical Hilton
2. Cheerio, New Zealand
3. Playing Around Rotorua

The view of Nelson from Harris Hill (click to enlarge).

Sarah writes: We just wrapped up our most unusual and special Christmas ever, which we celebrated at a rental cottage in Nelson, New Zealand. Ending the year here and being on this journey together is the ultimate “gift that keeps on giving.” Since my 8-year-old son Kyle spent part of his homeschooling week writing about this place, and Morgan took terrific photos, I decided to hand this blog post over to them. I hope you enjoy Kyle’s very own blog post and movie!

Mom and me homeschooling on our deck.

Right now I’m at Harris Hill. It is in Nelson, N.Z., which is at the top part of the South Island. It is at a farm with animals like a hairy pig, goats, sheep, calves/cows/bulls, dogs, ponies, horses, llamas and chickens. It has a view of the blue bay, and since we’re near the ocean, it’s windy! The wind makes the grass look like waves.

When we’re inside we hear the sheep and listen to the birds cheep. We’re staying in a cozy cabin. The best part of it is we get our own rooms! We’ve had to share our rooms the last four months.

The farm is like a petting zoo to me. I love the animals. The one I love the most is the hairy pig. We call him Hairy Porker. We feed him food like fruit, vegetables and leftover meals.

Hairy Porker begging for food.

Me with the pesky goats.

We're at a giant hill overlooking the sea.

The weird thing is, we have fruit like strawberries and cherries in December because we’re near the summer solstice. Christmas is weird because it’s cold where we usually live and warm in New Zealand. It’s also different because we made decorations, and I made a popcorn string for the tree. My grandparents also sent me a lot of yarn to make decorations with.

We decorated a small pine tree that is still growing.

Today we had Christmas with our small pine tree. We woke up with our shoes as stockings and found candy in them. (That’s what they do in Holland, and Santa puts candy in there. We didn’t have stockings so we put our shoes by the front door.) I woke up my family to see the presents. My favorite was my IPod Touch! I also got three books that I’m excited to read, and I got two decks of cards from my grandparents. They also gave me instructions on how to play poker because they think it’s time for me to learn how. Then Colly opened her box. It was a computer (laptop)! It was a special Christmas for our family because we’ve never had a Christmas like this.

My dad made this card for our family and friends.

Harris Hill makes me feel like I’m at home. It will feel great to end the year here.

Here is my video of Harris Hill.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Cheerio, New Zealand
2. Meals with Eels and Other Nelson Must-Do’s
3. Playing Around Rotorua

We gave the kids an art lesson in Santiago's sculpture garden, one of several well-kept parks in Chile's capital city.

On Day 2 of our short visit to Santiago, Chile, Morgan and I talked about how stupid we felt for having lumped Chile with Argentina and assuming they’d be the same. Our knowledge of Chile was based on college courses in the late 1980s that revealed the brutality of General Pinochet and the CIA’s role in the coup that put him in power from 1973 to 1990. With our minds stuck on “Third World” stereotypes of Latin American dictatorships and human rights abuses, we expected Santiago to be like Buenos Aires, but not necessarily as nice. Clearly, we hadn’t paid attention to news from Chile for the past twenty years.

We discovered a city with a canopy of trees and impeccably landscaped medians lining its major boulevards, walking paths and gardens fronting its river, and a culinary scene more creative and sophisticated than anything we’ve tasted since leaving Northern California. A metropolitan park with a peak called San Cristóbal is full of trails, a zoo and picnic areas, and it looks better maintained than Golden Gate Park. Exquisite old neighborhoods skirt the park with streets mostly free of graffiti, and drivers drive larger, newer cars than in Argentina and stop for pedestrians.

One of the prettiest neighborhood streets we ran on: Pedro de Valdivia near the entrance to Parque Metropolitano de Santiago.

We’re here as an afterthought; our November 30 flight to Auckland leaves from Santiago, so we figured we might as well spend a few days here. We’ve spent the past 72 hours trying to soak up as much as we can of all the city has to offer — which means lots of walking and lots of eating. After two months of a diet heavy on beef and potatoes, we’re gorging ourselves on fresh fruit and seafood — cherries, strawberries and avocados (12 for $1) are at the peak of the season, and crab and lobster are on menus everywhere. Lobster empanadas — now there’s something I can’t get enough of!

A view of some of the countless Andes peaks we saw from the bus ride through the border.

We came here from Mendoza via bus through the Andes, a jaw-dropping route I’ll always remember for two things: the peaks around Aconcagua, and the customs office. Chile’s security apparatus leaves nothing to chance, and at customs they’re on the lookout not only for explosives and contraband, but also for produce that could transport pests that threaten the country’s agriculture. (This morning we met a man from Florida who said he was detained for a couple of hours in Santiago’s airport, during which he had to fill out paperwork and pay a $200 fine because he had an apple in his backpack.)

We were waiting in line at the customs terminal, which straddles the Andes range seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when we noticed some officials looking for the owners of a locked blue backpack that I recognized as Kyle’s. It turns out they were alarmed by a suspicious round object shown in the X-ray. Could it be a bomb — or an orange? I nervously stepped forward, unlocked the pack and winced as they rifled through all of Kyle’s stuff until they pulled out the offending object: his baseball! They ran the baseball through the X-ray one more time before allowing us to proceed.

At long last, following a crazy rush-hour cab drive with our packs roped to the top of the roof, we reached our destination: a well-priced boutique hotel called Meridiano Sur in a great location, just off the very happening scene on Avenida Providencia and near the river and parks.

Colly outside our hotel, next to a bougainvillea in bloom.

The scene on Avenida Providencia, near our hotel.

Our first full day coincided with Thanksgiving, during which we made little effort to maintain holiday traditions except for expressions of gratitude (roast turkey was nowhere to be found or cooked). The warm spring air had us all in short sleeves and shorts. We got a tour of the vibrant Providencia district by walking a few kilometers on clean sidewalks and cobblestone streets, past cafes and well-maintained century-old architecture, to a graduate school of orthodontics where we had set up an appointment for Colly to repair a loose brace.

A stock image from Wikimedia of the skyline in "Sanhattan."

That evening, for our Thanksgiving meal, we chose Nolita restaurant for its well-reviewed seafood and Italian fare. The meal was superb — but the setting was not at all what we expected. The restaurant is located in the booming financial district nicknamed “Sanhattan” because of its gleaming new skyscrapers and malls decked out with costly landscaping and chrome. American restaurant franchises and American companies have mushroomed there, which left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt as though we were in some of the most upscale parts of West LA — not that I dislike West LA; it’s just not what I wanted to experience in South America. It’s also unpleasant to contemplate how this economic boom got its start in the darkest periods of the country’s modern history, when Pinochet forced privatization and other free-market reforms (while also overseeing censorship, torture and the disappearance of thousands). It’s interesting to see the city spangled with hundreds of political posters plastered everywhere with faces of different candidates all promising “el cambio” (change) — and to think that any type of political advertising was banned until 1988, when Chile began its transition back to democracy.

Morgan snapped this shot of me during our run to the top of San Cristobal, where the Virgin Mary statue watches over Santiago.

Throughout this century of change in Chile, the Virgin Mary herself has kept watch over Santiago in the form of a giant statue on the summit of San Cristóbal. It was erected in 1908, about ten years before the gorgeous park was established and all the vegetation was planted around it. Shortly thereafter, a tramway called the Funicular was built to transport visitors up the steep hill.

The Funicular still runs daily and is a must-do for any visitor. We took it to the top, and the kids kept exclaiming, “This is fun!” and each time they said “fun,” we automatically replied, “-icular!” From the tram’s upper station it’s 207 steps (yes, we counted) to the base of the statue, where you can see the city spread out and the Andes as the backdrop. It was so pretty — but again, a bit much like LA. A smoggy haze obscured the view, and the sprawl in the outlying valley had an uncanny resemblance to Glendale and Burbank.

The 1925 tram to the top of the park is called the Funicular. It is fun! (-icular!)

We shouldn’t pass any strong judgments on this city, though, because we barely got to know it. Like the Chilean version of Spanish that my ear can barely decipher — a rapid mumbling full of unfamiliar vocabulary — I’m just starting to figure it out, and now it’s time to go.

Santiago looking down from the peak of San Cristobal.

Another shot from our time in the sculpture garden.

Our non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner started with a platter of raw shellfish, followed by taking turns saying thanks. We are immensely grateful for this experience, and for our family, friends and health.

Related posts:

1. Halfway There Together: Surprises and Changes So Far
2. When It Rains…
3. Playing Around Rotorua

Morgan and I spent a lot of time last week doing travel research and making reservations while the stormy weather kept us mostly inside.

Before Morgan and I left in mid-August, we talked a lot about how there will be times when traveling gets tough, when we feel fatigued and worried about the myriad consequences of uprooting for a year, and when we second-guess our choices. We knew we’d feel homesick not just for home per se, but for friends and familiar routines, and we might feel pangs of regret. That’s why we added the “no regrets” phrase to our tagline — not because we’re blithely traipsing off in the world with nothing weighing us down but our backpacks, but rather because we knew from the start that doubt might haunt us, just as first-time home buyers flirt with buyers’ remorse when the repairs pile up and bills come due. “No regrets” is shorthand for “no turning back, so let’s make this work, and in the long run we’ll look back and be so glad we did it.” Or in Spanish, vale la pena. It’s what we say to each other and to ourselves to bolster confidence and commitment, because what we’re doing takes an occasional pep talk.

Last week was one of those weeks.

This may come as a surprise, since the previous post about arriving in Patagonia was so effusive. As my brother noted, we seemed besotted with the landscape. We still are, but we had, for lack of a better word, a moody week, exacerbated by a steady rain and cold that limited our ability to get outside and explore. Cabin fever and my head cold infected the cabana’s coziness.

A tour of Bariloche's chocolate museum lifted our spirits one afternoon and also gave us all an interesting history lesson.

Nothing terrible happened — no accidents or thefts — just minor disappointments, annoyances and parenting/sibling flareups. For example, a close call on a run (described on my running blog) made us dwell on worst-case scenarios and the extra steps we need to take to avoid them. Then there was a fiasco involving the Kindle, in which something that should be simple — shipping a defective Kindle back to Amazon.com and receiving a replacement — turned into a weeks-long abject lesson in navigating international customs, taxes and language barriers, which took more money, phone calls and cab rides than I care to relate. Morgan, with the help of his dad back home, eventually sorted it all out.

We experienced a higher-than-average number of travel planning snafus, such as when I screwed up and booked some wrong dates for New Zealand and couldn’t simply change them back. Then, more hours spent speaking and emailing in broken Spanish to make a reservation for lodging we really need next week, and finally getting to the bank to make a deposit to secure it (because a lot of these places require cash deposits, not credit cards called in) — and then discovering, as the rain fell and cab drove away, that the bank closed an hour earlier. Now we know that banks close at 1:00 on Thursdays.

And then there was the case of the bored, clever 8-year-old gremlin named Kyle who kept changing passwords and other settings on IPhones, IPods, laptops, in-room safes and any other device with a button and a silicon chip, in spite of repeated reminders and warnings, which led to technical difficulties and parental reprimands. And a laughably bad daytrip, which Colly described on her blog better than I ever could.

Kyle has grown very attached to this dog, which belongs to the groundskeeper. He loves playing with her, but then gets sad when he remembers our dog back home and realizes he'll have to say goodbye to this dog, too.

Meanwhile, I struggled to put more than two sentences together on this blog, briefly contemplated a pitch for a freelance writing assignment and then abandoned all efforts for several days, convinced that no one would ever care to find and read my long-winded prose since I’m apparently the only one in the over-saturated travel-writing universe who has decided not to Twitter.

All four of us, at various times, argued over how best to spend our days and how best to homeschool. We tossed and turned at night over long-term plans and got teary about missed friends and holiday traditions.

I’ve probably lost a lot of readers at this point who have no patience or sympathy for this sad sack. I hope you understand my main motive: to document some of the down days along with the good times, so that we don’t forget them when we wax nostalgic a year from now, and so anyone contemplating a similar journey gets a more complete picture.

Colly, bless her heart and mind, channeled our collective mood into her blog post linked above and created a pro/con list about long-term travel. Thinking about what I might list, I realized almost everything would be a “pro” but could also be a “con.” For example, “more family time” — definitely a positive, until you grow tired of finishing each others’ sentences all day long and yearn to socialize with others. “Flexible schedule and more free time” — wonderful, except on days when you struggle to prioritize and feel adrift. “Homeschooling” — so far so good, but when for whatever reason the process backfires, it’s a painful double-whammy: you’re a bad parent AND a bad teacher. “Experience new cultures and simpler ways of life” — always good, and I’m so grateful to see the world from outside of the Piedmont bubble, but feeling like a fish-out-of-water occasionally wears thin.

Halloween 2009: The kids were blue because they knew from friends' emails that they were missing parties, school costume parades and trick-or-treating. Argentina doesn't celebrate Halloween, but Morgan and I surprised the kids with some candy and we all had fun taste-testing the Latin American brands.

A couple of days ago, for example, I grew frustrated at the grocery store by my inability to decipher the strange brands and felt helpless to cook anything decent for dinner since I don’t have any spices or proper cookware. As I fruitlessly looked for frozen pie crust, canned pumpkin and condensed milk, I thought, Can it really be this hard to make a pumpkin pie? Yes, when you’re the only one in the country who craves pumpkin pie in October, it is!

But these lows don’t last. I knew this one wouldn’t, and it didn’t. Like in a marathon, as a favorite piece of advice I once heard goes, “There will be highs and there will be lows, and neither will last very long.” The same is true with long-term travel. Appreciate the highs and ride out the lows. Look up and around and think, We’re really doing this, we’re really seeing all these parts of the world together. Hallelujah!

Several factors pushed us out of last week’s funk: Morgan’s good advice and dark humor, a momentary lifting of the clouds for a fantastic day trip (details and photos in a post to come), the hatching of bird eggs outside our window, and — as is so often the case — running. If I have one piece of round-the-world travel advice to share this week, it’s this: Nurture a hobby as you go. It can be hiking, art history — anything that adds more meat to the skeleton of an itinerary, motivates you to explore more of the landscape, and makes you feel better when you get stalled in one point. Thanks to running we toured Buenos Aires on foot, and now we’re altering our itinerary to fit in some more races (such as the Nov. 14 Salomon K42 trail marathon in Villa La Angostura).

Cause for celebration: The eggs outside our window hatched! All week long we watched the mother guard her eggs and squawk at anything threatening. Yesterday, Morgan rescued a chick that fell down a drainpipe.

Running takes us places not found in any guidebooks. For example, I experienced a sense of accomplishment last week when I booked a room in the middle of Nowhere, New Zealand, following a string of travel-planning setbacks. We’re going there so Morgan and I can both run a trail race the weekend of January 16 — the first race we’ve ever registered for that requires runners to carry a whistle and safety blanket — and I think I even managed to find a babysitter (broadly defined) to watch the kids during the event.

The race ends on the West Coast of the South Island in a tiny hamlet called Blackball, at a roadhouse called the Blackball Hilton (the use of “Hilton” appears to be a long-running joke). We wanted to stay there since it’s the only place around, even though the most recent review on tripadvisor.com warns, “The rooms were tiny, dated and not to mention dirty. The room had layers of dust in it, dead flies and dirty carpets. The bathrooms were at the end of a corridor, and were also very dated and had flimsy locks.”

I placed an international call through Skype to the proprietor and had a lovely chat with a lady who seemed to come from Kiwi central casting, who punctuated each sentence with “right-oh!” and “no worries!” She told me she would be delighted to keep an eye on my kiddos during the morning of the race, and Colly and Kyle could have the run of the pub and help her manage the festivities as runners crossed the finish line. This was all oddly reassuring, not alarming, to me. Sometimes you just have to go with a gut feeling. I reserved the night before the race in the Blackball Hilton’s “family room” (who knows what that room classification means exactly), and I hung up very happy and grateful to know that we have a date in New Zealand two-and-a-half months from now in a backroad tavern with 100 other trail runners to keep us company.

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While in Colorado, the kids got a tour of the University of Colorado Special Collections department, including a peek at their great-grandfather's archives.

As my first post on our quasi-home-schooling detailed, I had a lot of concerns that tempered the alluring prospect of taking Colly and Kyle out of school and teaching them while we travel. So here’s the gist of how it’s going so far: It’s working out better than I could have hoped, and all four of us find the arrangement nearly ideal. We have independent study contracts through their school district, which effectively means we’re doing a hybrid of homeschooling and traditional schooling. We generally follow the schedule and content of their grade-level core curriculum, with some long-distance guidance from their teachers, but tailor their studies to leverage the educational opportunities of our travels.

A homeschooling "Everyday Math" lesson: Kyle practices addition and learns about probability while his grandfather teaches him Blackjack.

The kids’ minds are expanding, they’re learning the basics that they need to know to pass the 3rd and 6th grades, and they say the only thing they miss about school is the other kids and a couple of favorite teachers. We all tremendously appreciate the gift of time and flexibility that homeschooling gives. Back home, their peers are in school from about 8:30 until 3, followed by an afternoon of scheduled sports and activities, followed by lots of homework. By contrast, Colly and Kyle spend about two to three hours, four or five days a week, doing required schoolwork (e.g. math, language arts, science and history basics) — and then they’re done. There’s no more rushing to get from Point A to B on time, no more homework hassles and scheduling stress. No more time wasted on transitioning from one period to another at school and zoning out while the teacher helps other students. No more being told to put away what they’re working on — even if they’re in the middle of working on something they care about — because the classroom schedule says it’s time to do something else. Colly’s blog post on homeschooling describes her perspective on what we’re doing — and the fact she wants to blog is a prime example of travel-inspired learning.

Nonetheless, I question how we’re handling things and see room for improvement. Are we doing too much “schoolwork” (which is hard to define) or too little? Are Morgan and I providing too much structure and direction, or not enough? Are we blowing the opportunity to maximize the benefits of genuine homeschooling by following their schools’ assignments?

Take the last two weeks, for example. Colly plugged away at a chapter in math, wrote a creative short story, answered questions on a worksheet about a history chapter, reviewed vocabulary lists and took a grammar quiz. Kyle completed worksheets for math and language arts, wrote in his journal and practiced cursive. Both kids read novels on their own, and also read and discussed Time’s weekly kids’ edition. Those were all assignments from school, and they all seemed pretty worthwhile (though we’ve debated whether Kyle learning cursive is a waste of time. We concluded that the process of developing fine motor skills and taking care with words is useful, as is being able to read cursive, even if he never writes much cursive himself because he’s going straight to a keyboard).

Colly's interest in writing has blossomed over the past two months. Here she's writing a story as we drive across Arizona.

For the most part, however, the best learning moments were sparked by the surroundings and our time together. When we got to Argentina and found ourselves surrounded by the metric system, we spent a morning measuring things in meters and comparing containers in the refrigerator that are in liters, which got the kids doing calculations involving addition, multiplication and decimals. On Thursday, we took a day trip from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, so we learned where Uruguay is on the map, how “Colonia” means “colony” and discussed a bit about what colonialism was all about. When we got there, they learned to convert Uruguay prices to Argentinian pesos (divide by 5) and then to U.S. dollars (divide by 4). On another recent morning, Kyle wrote a detailed letter to family back home and Colly added a “recommended reading” page with mini book reviews to her blog. Almost every day, we read aloud a chapter from Three Cups of Tea (Young Reader’s Edition), which gets us talking about what’s going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We’re picking up Spanish vocabulary and noticing cultural differences around the clock. And we’ve become hooked on Brain Pop videos, since the kids can’t get their TV fix from Spanish TV.

I cherish the time Colly and I were playing around with word choices while reviewing her blog, and she leaned into my arm, put her head on my shoulder, and said, “Thank you so much.” Or the time Kyle and Morgan spent the better part of a day learning a graphic design software program together. Or the time Morgan took the kids on a creepy tour of the Buenos Aires cemetery to marvel at the tombs and hunt for Evita’s.

All these impromptu lessons are hard to quantify and don’t necessarily “count” toward the kids’ independent study obligations, but they seem more meaningful and engaging than the school assignments, in part because they’re as much about family dynamics as about their education. Colly and Kyle are collaborating, growing closer to each other and also to us. They have two parents who are fully engaged in their lives. I wouldn’t trade these times for anything.

They think this is just "cool" and "fun," but they're also plotting strategy, figuring out spacial relations and resolving sibling conflict. (Colly laughed and mocked my seriousness when she read that caption!)

But, nothing’s perfect and easy (and wouldn’t it be boring if it were?).  Speaking of family dynamics, one bump on the roadschooling road has been the working relationship between Morgan and me. Our somewhat different approaches to homeschooling reflect — and sometimes magnify — differences in our personalities. He’s a less-is-more, let’s-be-flexible-and-try-new-things guy. I’m a more-is-better, let’s-stick-to-a-schedule-and-do-what-the-experts-say gal. He points out that the kids will have to spend the rest of their academic careers loaded with work and doing what their schools require, so they should do the minimum they need to do to meet independent study expectations for schoolwork this year. That way, he says, they’ll have more freedom to develop and nurture their intellectual interests, become self-directed learners and absorb what the foreign environment has to teach them.  I see his point, but — the kids are returning to regular school next fall, and I want them to succeed, not struggle, then. I say we should take advantage of this extra free time and the opportunity to work one-on-one with them to do all the schoolwork and more so they can master and even exceed the grade-level standards.

On good days, we balance each other out in a way that benefits the kids. Occasionally, though, we disagree over details and teaching styles. The conflict gets to the heart of my conflicted feelings over the way we’re homeschooling. I admit it: I think Morgan’s approach is the better one, and I would like to be able to see and do things more his way. But it’s hard for me to cede control over the kids’ education because I care so much about it and hence want to be (overly)involved in every aspect. I also feel accountable to the kids’ school since we agreed to follow their independent study plan. In hindsight, we could have completely withdrawn the kids from school, had an unstructured and experimental year of education, and then let them repeat their grades if necessary when we return (which wouldn’t be so bad, considering their spring birthdays make them relatively young for their grades). But none of us wanted to go down that road; we liked — and still appreciate — the curriculum and teacher guidance the school plan provides.

It's easy to get excited about writing and literature when you're with my brother David. Here, Kyle reads his essay aloud to his uncle, which prompts a silly yet stimulating discussion.

Now I sometimes think, “What if we really homeschooled?” It’s unlikely we’d do that now, since both kids want to get back to their school’s social scene, but I’m more open to it. I also hear Morgan echoing my brilliant brother’s view — my brother David, the writer and teacher, who together with my sister-in-law successfully homeschooled their two kids (who went on to earn numerous honors and merit scholarships at two prestigious colleges). They did full-blown homeschooling, in which “schooling” is not so much a separate, scheduled activity as a fully integrated approach to life. They trusted my niece and nephew to set the agenda by following and kindling their curiosity, and they moved through basic subjects such as math at the kids’ pace. My brother likes to quote Emerson:

… the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do … only he holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing, he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetition. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

I’m grateful we spent the first leg of the trip living with my brother and sister-in-law in Colorado and started our “roadschooling” year with them as role models. I admire their perspective and am coming around to it more and more — which means I’m caring less about the kids “keeping up” with what their peers are doing back home, and trusting and respecting them more to do what they want and at their own pace.

I increasingly have faith that learning is taking place all the time, and they’re more likely to remember lessons that sprout from their curiosity and are in the context of their real lives. I’m trying to step aside and act less as a manager, more as an on-call consultant, and to not interfere when Morgan is doing things his way with the kids.

Plate tectonics, ancient seas, sedimentary rock layers and erosion become more interesting when you're dazzled by the end result.

So here we are, about two months or one-fifth of the way through Kyle’s 3rd grade and Colly’s 6th grade, and you could say we’re all “learning as we go.” Despite my hand-wringing and over-analyzing above, we all love this new world of roadschooling and anticipate that it will be very difficult to go back to school next fall — not because the kids won’t be ready academically (I’m now confident they will be), but because we don’t want to give up this arrangement. Every time I ask Colly and Kyle how they like school this year compared to years past, they say it’s “way better.”

I’d say they’re developing a genuine curiosity about the world, becoming independent learners and risk-takers, making connections between academic disciplines and feeling that their education is relevant.

Morgan, to his credit, would probably say, “They’re being kids. They’re doing fine.”

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My "roads scholars" pictured earlier this summer near Tahoe.

I know it’s kind of crazy, because we’ll encounter extraordinary educational opportunities at every turn. Plus, most wise people recognize that learning takes place all the time and is more apt to blossom outside the confines of a classroom. So why the worry and resistance to the idea of homeschooling?

At the root is my fear of being inadequate as a teacher, and anxiety that my kids won’t “keep up” with their peers. My knee-jerk response to anxiety is to try to control the circumstances and outcomes; hence, I got our school supplies in place, got the kids working on academic review workbooks, and envisioned us sitting around a table starting a half-day, five-day-a-week schooling routine on the same day their real school back home reopens (August 26). In other words, I felt determined to replicate their 3rd- and 6th-grade classroom experience during travel.

Thank goodness I had an epiphany (or more of a “well, duh” moment) that my approach might cause us to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us all to learn in a different, potentially better way. I came across information and encouragement, highlighted below, that has made me less stressed, less rigid and much more excited about our adventure in “roadschooling.”

First, some background on how “school” will work for our family this year: We are fortunate to be in a high-quality public school district that granted both kids independent study contracts for the school year. Kyle has a 3rd-grade teacher assigned to him from his elementary school, and Colly has a 6th-grade teacher assigned to her from the middle school. Last spring, we all met and devised a plan for the coming year. (This was fairly simple because, as luck would have it, another local family did this same thing the previous year and paved the way for us to follow their example.)

Under the contract, the kids will follow the core curriculum, communicate with their teacher approximately once a week via email and periodically turn in a sampling of work — enough homework and special projects so that the teacher can see the child is following the program and meeting the standards. It’s up to Morgan and me to do the bulk of instruction and review their work. We see it as a win-win: our kids get an educational plan designed to meet grade-level standards, plus a teacher to help them long-distance. They also get to feel like they’re still a part of their school. We parents get the structure of the curriculum and expertise of its teachers, and we avoid the bureaucratic and legal hurdles many homeschooling parents face when they pull their kids out of school. The school district, meanwhile, gets the daily attendance money from the state that it would otherwise lose if our kids un-enrolled; plus, the district gets two kids who will re-enter school the following year more likely to succeed, having followed the school’s program during their year away.

Kyle's summer workbook (click for amazon link). Colly did the Grade 5 - 6 one.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? My doubts crept in, however, when I grappled with how and when to teach my kids. As a warm-up, I bought them each workbooks in the Summer Bridge Activities series to review the basics they learned the previous school year, and to get us all used to “doing school” at home. The workbooks themselves are quite good — a nice mix of language arts, math, science and history, formatted in a manageable “daily dose.”

But after about a week, our workbook routine began to devolve from enthusiastic and fruitful (concepts reviewed, discussions sparked) to laborious and futile (kids groaning and rolling eyes while saying, “Do I have to?” … me hovering and overly correcting their work, repeating “Just get it done”). I see in hindsight I was too authoritative about determining when they should work during the day, and I set arbitrary deadlines for when they should complete the lessons. I beat myself up: In a mere matter of weeks, I made them view academic work as a chore and to dread having me as their teacher.

I took a deep breath, cut myself slack and tried to open my mind. (Easier said than done!) Here is some of the advice that helped me regroup and take a fresh approach to this year of schooling:

• Have confidence that the kids will learn not only what they’re “supposed to” learn, but immeasurably more; and that what they learn on the road and through their own volition is more likely to stick and positively shape them. This point is emphasized by homeschooling experts such as Helen Hegener, who wrote that her children taught her to “relax and trust that learning was always happening, with or without my help, and the learning that happened without my assistance was much more likely to be useful and relevant.” I also heard this point made by other round-the-world blogging families such as The Andruses of Utah, who wrote: “On the road, school is a round-the-clock, ever-changing experience, a 7-day-a-week field trip that teaches them more about the world and themselves than they could ever learn at home.”
• Try not to always measure their progress and productivity by traditional, quantitative means (e.g. minutes spent reading, number of answers correct), and don’t keep comparing them to their peers back home; rather, embrace this chance to let them learn individually and independently, more in tune with their own pace and learning style. Measure their success as much by the spirit of the process as by the end result. The confidence and love of learning they gain will pay off in the long run. I know this advice is hard for me to follow, so I’ll re-read those lines the next time I grow impatient by how long it takes my daughter to do a page of math problems or exasperated by how many seemingly simple words my son misspells in a paragraph. If she “gets it” and feels good about it, that’s great, no matter how long it takes; if he has bright thoughts and clever word choices driving those misspellings, then that’s terrific.
• Stop thinking of myself as a teacher who can dump facts into my kids’ heads, as if I could program them to download information at my command. It helps me to recall a moment when we were in the Smithsonian last Spring Break. The kids kept wanting to run off and see something that caught their eye. Their voices bubbled with interest, “Look, Mom, check this out!” But instead, I held them back; I said, “No, wait, come here and listen to this,” and I would proceed to read out loud each exhibit’s caption. They grew bored and stopped listening to my lectures. Then they lost their eagerness to run and explore other exhibits — they just wanted to run away from me. It’s an all-too-typical example of how I can be overly controlling and fall into power struggles with the kids. On this trip, I’ll try to follow their lead more often, and to think of myself as a student alongside them, hopefully sharing and supporting their curiosity.
• Be flexible with expectations and scheduling so that we can learn by exploring our surroundings, and by letting the kids follow their natural interests. (See point above.) How silly it would be to say “no” if the kids wanted to take a special hike or see a performance one weekday morning because we set a schedule to get through a textbook chapter during that time slot.
• Try to practice the principles of Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen. This involves using encouragement and abiding by the belief that kids do well when they feel well; balancing kindness and firmness; coming up with solutions together to resolve conflict instead of threatening consequences; and letting children take risks, do things on their own and learn from mistakes. This book is one of the best and most effective parenting books I ever read. But it’s counter-intuitive to the way I’ve always done things, so I need to re-read it and keep working on it.
  

  One of my favorite parenting books, which helps with teaching too (click for amazon link).

We’re taking risks and have lots to learn. I’m sure we’ll make mistakes all along the way. But I’m going to try to view that as cause for celebration, not concern.

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