I chose the Arequipay Backpackers Hostel because of their advertised fun facilities: a movie room, games tables (pool and table tennis) and, as a special reward for my boys after the Inca Trail hike, a PS3.
Yay! This photo was taken at Intipunku, the Sun Gate which leads from the Inka Trail to Machu Picchu at the end of our four-day hike.
And this is inside the Machu Picchu site, just below the Sun Gate, with the peak of Huayna Picchu just visible behind us.
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CAM was so engrossed in his schoolwork, he didn’t even notice me taking this photo. He was working on the assignments from a programming course he took through CTY. (He finished a 10-week course in 2 weeks, even though we kept up a pretty aggressive sightseeing and travel schedule during that time). This roadschooling is sometimes difficult to fit into the day, but so far, we’re having pretty good luck with batching up the work – for doing on long bus rides, for example.
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It was mostly overcast during our day at Cotopaxi National Park, but we catch sight of the famous peak briefly before we started our hike down the mountain.
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We’re glad we packed:
1. Headlamps. We’re using Petzl headlamps and highly recommend them. They rock for: kids reading in bed at night, compensating for the lack of outdoor lighting at a rental house and taking a nighttime run on the beach – for a few unusual uses.
2. A small flexible extension cord. Ours is a cheapie one from our local drug store (although REI does stock a pricey “travel extension cord” from Swiss Army). With one socket converter, we can charge three devices making it easy to keep Kindles, Nintendos, the netbook and the camera charged most of the time.
3. Waist wallets.
4. Long underwear. The Andes in the Spring are warm and sunny during the day but sweet heavens it’s freezing at night!
5. A handful of dried cherries and pineapple scores a winning smile from an Andean toddler.
We’ve learned:
1. Don’t take directions using public transport without asking for the bus, tram or train number -and be suspicious if the person giving directions puts an arrow pointing off the map to the intended destination. Our taxi-ride from central Quito to the bus station to catch a bus to Cotopaxi took long enough that even Cillan was starting to get suspicious that we may be in danger.
2. Always carry an empty plastic bag. Why? See here.
3. Washing clothes by hand is hard work! (Murph may disagree, but maybe that’s because I’m more particular when I do the washing).
4. In Ecuador buying bus tickets at the station is more expensive than buying them on the bus. We’re only talking about a few dollars difference, but when you’re keeping a tight budget it’s worth keeping in mind.
How the kids are doing:
1. They don’t seem to be bothered by the abrupt change from Starbucks-on-every-corner Seattle to being stinky backpackers in impoverished Central Ecuador. They still rate free wifi in accommodation a critical necessity.
2. So long as they have a seat on the bus, hopping on and off the busy buses plying the Panamerica Sur and coastal Ecuador has become as normal as walking to our local grocery store.
3. We’re going to have toileting issues. At least one of our children is only comfortable using a clean, western-style toilet with a seat. We’re already joking that by the time we get to Western China the standards in Ecuador will seem regal in comparison.
4. We’re planning to follow the Seattle Public School 2010/2011 calendar. School started on Wednesday 9/8. So far, so good.
5. The kids have started blogging at TravelingPikmin.com. Officially, this is school-work (the writing component), but I’m finding it’s fun to read what they have to say about the trip.
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We started our family world trip in Quito, Ecuador. Although we plan to chill out at the beach in Southern Ecuador for a little rest and relaxation before we start the trip proper, I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little geekiness and take photos standing on the Equator as a way to mark the start of our journey in a notable way. My boys were only too happy to comply.
Mitad Del Mundo is an equatorial marker about an hour north of Quito. It’s a totally manufactured tourist attraction, but it’s fun. You can take your photo in front of the small on-site museum or…
standing on the line marking the Equator or…
high-five-ing across the Equator.
The Mitad Del Mundo is easily accessible via the blue line public buses from central Quito. There is an expressway which runs along Av America and Av Del La Prensa. If like us, you think that you don’t really need to take the express bus, be warned, the trip takes at least 30 minutes longer on the local buses. We paid less than $5 there and back for all four of us.
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Since our recent dinner-time conversation where CAM berated us for being irresponsible parents for abandoning our jobs in order to go travel for a year, I’ve been thinking about the reasons behind my confidence in making this choice now. CAM is right, it is a little crazy to leave a well-paying job in the middle of a recession but I argue that taking a trip like ours is never a financially prudent decision and there are other reasons why now is a good time for us to leave.
Our children are the perfect ages for family world travel. We first considered the idea of taking a year to travel in 2001 but with a new baby and a kindergartener who struggled with change, we parked our plans. In 2007, when CAM was coming to the end of 5th grade, we discussed the trip again with our kids. BigB’s response was to run to get his toothbrush. CAM flat out refused to even consider the idea. Just a year later we started talking about 2010 as our proposed departure date. Never enthusiastic, CAM resigned himself to the mercy of his crazy parents and at least entertained the idea as a thought experiment.
Even at this point, we could have kept on talking and never actually taken the trip if it were not for two things. Firstly, a friend of mine here in Seattle took five months and traveled in South East Asia with her husband and two boys who were just a little older than my boys – and they had a fantastic time. Secondly, the recession brought us some financial turmoil, enough for me to think, “OK fine, I’m going to have to re-build my retirement savings anyway, why not take a break and then start saving again when we get back?”
But neither of these reasons would make someone comfortable with the risk of leaving a job and perhaps having difficulty finding another one in a year’s time. That confidence – if it is confidence, not hubris, only time will tell – comes from the career experiences I’ve had over the past 19 years working in technology.
This will be the fourth time I’ve resigned a position without having another job to go to. The first time, when we moved from Dublin to the U.S. I was way too excited at the prospect of moving to a new country to worry about something as minor as work – at least for the first couple of weeks. And once we started looking for work, we were gainfully employed within days. I left work again when CAM was born, finding a new job just as quickly once I realized that I was not cut out to be a stay-at-home mom. Similarly, I stayed at home for three years after BigB was born and my job search in that case amounted to a phone call to my previous employer. Who knows what the job market will be like when we return to Seattle, but I’m pretty bullish on my employment prospects. (You can check my LinkedIn profile if you think I’m making this up.)
There’s a general point here relating to working in technology and how the business of building software is new enough to have counter-culture tendancies such as being more tolerant of people taking a break from work now and then than other industries. There is a price for this, as anyone who has worked on shipping a software product or who has supported software systems will tell you: long hours are expected, no required when you’re in the middle of a project. But this is a true ‘work hard, play hard’ world and I’m glad that I can take advantage of it.
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One of the best things about being a parent blogger is that you get to write about the funny things your kids say and do. Continue reading
I’m a blather-er. You’ve never heard that word? Apparently it’s a Norse word, but people use it a lot in Ireland. As in “She’s an awful blather-er” to describe someone who goes on-and-on-and-on and never really gets to the point. That’d be me, most of the time. Which is why when I’m writing a blog post I have to make a huge effort to be brief and stay on point. But today I’m going to indulge in a a little navel-gazing introspection and blather for a moment. Feel free to sign off now if you’re not interested.
These days, I sit on the bus on the way home from work, dreaming up and partially writing fun blog posts about the awesome places we’ll be going and things we’ll be doing on our family world travels, but once I walk in my front door all thoughts of eloquent prose dissipate in an instant. I finally understand why artists may choose not to have children. I can’t think about writing while I’m defusing arguments between my kids or thinking about what they might like for dinner and by the time they’re quietly playing or reading, my brain is fried.
This is reaching a critical point at the moment because my kids are very stressed. They’ve known about our trip for over two years now. In Italy, our urban backpacking trip was a “proof-of-concept” experiment for my husband and I to verify to ourselves that our boys would be able to handle this style of travel. They had a blast. They were more dubious about our recent experience hosteling in Ireland but amused by the novelty of this style of accommodation. They’ve been involved in many conversations about where we’re going and what we’ll be doing. They drove the decision to incorporate schooling into the trip. But the reality of what we’re doing seems to be just hitting them now. As I box books and sell furniture around them, they’re starting to appreciate the fact that we’re really leaving Seattle.
So right now, they’re wigging out in all kinds of ways. You might say that I should have expected as much when I sold out their beds from under them (they’re currently sleeping on mattresses on the floor), but they’d grown out of their bunk-beds anyway. Yesterday’s pandemonium came when I asked BigB to empty his desk (because I’m selling it today). The sulking was Olympic standard. He’s never really used the desk as a desk!! Even though I still have a monster packing to-do list, we went for ice-cream and talked about how he was feeling. He’s scared. Mostly about what it will be like when we return. Will he go to the same school? Will he be in the same class as his friends? What will his room look like? (Since I said he’ll get a new, bigger, bed and desk). It’s interesting to me that he has no questions or worries about the trip itself.
CAM was resisting all involvement in our trip preparations. When I asked for his help on Tuesday, he pointed out that it was “unfair of me to expect him to help me pack for a trip that he doesn’t want to do”. (Imagine a big parenting deep breath). I said that since we’d leased our house, whether he wanted to travel or not, we still needed to pack up our stuff. He’d obviously thought about this while I was at work yesterday because he came to me in the early evening with a hug and said “Mom, tell me what I can do to help you for an hour”. I was so happy I nearly cried. Then he continued “And when I’m done, you can let me do what I want to do for an hour without bugging me”. I think a promise an hour of zero nagging while he plays video games in exchange for his help in boxing books is a fair trade. We’ll see how long that agreement lasts – I only need another week or so and then we’ll be done.
Schooling is the first thing most people ask about when they learn about our upcoming family world trip – and rightly so. We would be negligent parents if we hadn’t considered the educational needs of our boys (now almost 10 and 14) when we decided to do this trip.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started by meeting with the principals of my childrens schools. The strong message I heard was that our trip would be an invaluable educational experience for my children which both teachers wholeheartedly supported. For both children the required trip schoolwork boiled down to: grade-level math, daily writing and plenty of reading – which is what I had suspected would be the recommendation before I met with the teachers.
Of these, math is the skill for which I needed to have a year-long curriculum, relevant teaching material, and plenty of exercises to practice new skills. In the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and learning about what is required for 5th grade and 9th grade math. On top of this, I had my own requirements relating to portability and flexibility so that doing math can be a short daily activity and not something we battle with. My kids have used online programs such as Johns Hopkins CTY Distance Learning in school breaks already but I opted to exclude such programs from our search because I don’t want to be tied to having internet access to keep up a daily math habit.
Thanks to the many dedicated parents who homeschool their children, there is a wealth of information available on the internet about math programs. I found Homeschoolmath.net one of the best summary resources available. For BigB, I needed a workbook-based program which would cover much of the same material as the Washington State 5th grade curriculum requirements. This ruled out many of the spiral-type programs since it was difficult to discern where we’d start in the spiral and be sure that the program would cover all the required topics in a year. We’d like to keep our bags as light as possible so programs with a heavy reliance on manipulatives are also not suitable. Since he’s very capable, I looked for a program which would challenge him – and easily allow us to continue with 6th grade material if we need to. I chose the Singapore Math program. As a side benefit, I was able to pick up complete sets of workbooks and textbook for both 5th and 6th grade on Amazon.com.
High school math was a completely different and much more challenging problem for me to solve. What, in heaven’s name, does a kid learn in 9th grade math? And what do you do with a kid who’s a math geek already? While it was nice to think that I could have BigB ready for 6th grade, his teacher had already assured me that “if there are any holes when you get back, we’ll work through those with him”. I didn’t think that the AP math teacher at our local high school would be so helpful.
In the end, I reached out to a friend who put me in touch with her co-worker, a math teacher at a local high school and I shared my problem. For a fee (roughly similar to the cost of a single CTY course), this teacher tested CAM to understand his current skill level, investigated the entry requirements for 10th grade AP math and put together a detailed program for us based on this Geometry textbook. I now have a textbook and a set of more than 70 worksheets to complement the book – and the textbook is available in a Kindle edition which is an added bonus.
I’m finally ready to check this item off my pre-trip to-do list. Next up: reading material for a tween and a teen for a year. I did a little crowd-sourcing to come up with a list of books because most of what I was reading at the same age is way too girly for my boys. Check back later this week when I’ll be sharing this part of our road-schooling curriculum.
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