Worldschoolers

I am so happy to have found a community of people on Facebook called "Worldschoolers." Thousands of people travelling the world and schooling their kids!

A new friend from there who lives in England just sent me this wonderful link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servius_Tullius
Tee hee. no, that's not it. That's research from the book I'm writing on Ancient Rome. She sent me THIS:
http://www.france-passion.co.uk/about.shtml


Another friend (editor, in France, met through Editors Association of Earth), sent me this:

http://goglamping.net/glamp-sites/france/

Airplane tickets bought

Taking the cats along indeed is adding a lot more layers of complexity and expense than one would expect! Nonetheless we haven't wavered in our resolve: ours is a 12-foot family. We aren't going to jettison anyone.

Since we have the cats, we can't fly straight to Ireland (at least, not without about $3000 extra), so we're flying to the continent. Since one of my best friends is in Belgium, we were going to fly to Brussels, but some terrorists have bombed the airport, so we are flying into Luxembourg instead.

That means we somehow have to schlep all the luggage to a taxi and then to a train, but then our friend will pick us up in Liege where she lives. That's good.

I still have no idea, after a LOT of research, as to how I'm going to insure the van. Every insurance agency I've chatted to in Ireland either doesn't do Canadians or doesn't do campervans. I've sort of given up and decided to just go get us there and figure out what comes next, then. We are sure looking forward to meeting our van Gigi though!

Here are some pictures of her. You can see how we fell in love with her I think!

Christa

March 17, 2016. The day we get to begin

 

March 17, 2016. Today is the day we get to begin! 

I have been trying to leave this province for about 5 years now. I thought I had us pretty much away to Europe last year -- campervan in Europe purchased, 1 year visa to France applied for, health insurance got, homeschool registered for, curriculum lined up, wwoof memberships lined up. Cats inoculated and passported and all that.

And then... something unpleasant and unjust happened, and we got delayed. Since we were delayed, we moved to this beautiful touristy interesting mountain town called Banff for the winter. At least that let us have an adventurous season, even though we were kind of in jail, in a way. Boy had to go to school by a ludicrous court order (they hadn't even looked at my considerable credentials or plans, just ruled against us). 

He's learned some interesting things here. At school this year, he learned by a large body of evidence that when a bunch of short mean guys are bullying you, it's probably because they're less accomplished than you are. And he's learned that if he persists, he can indeed get hired as a busboy at the age of 12 (yes, that's legal here), and he can even convince the originally-skeptical-boss that a 12-year-old can be an awesome employee. He's left with a great letter of reference.

And I learned that my kid was top of the class. At elementary school the report cards were so extremely noncommital that I really hadn't had any inkling. Honestly, I thought he was about average in his class.  Or I didn't really think about it much.

So, I partially attribute his top-ness here to very few kids in his class here reading books at all. I do think he would have had more intellectual peers in his old school, but who knows? I didn't really get a lot of chance to compare. I do remember that they enjoyed it when he presented about his Europe trip in grade 5. As long as he can do stuff the grades that teacher assign don't mean much to me. Still, it's nicer when they're higher!

The teachers here are rather glad to have him, anyway. So, that's nice. Isn't it? I feel like I'm going on overmuch so I'll stop.

Anyway, finally, the courts ground to their slow conclusion and re-produced the same paper they had produced in 2009, saying I'm the kid's mom and nobody oughtta interfere with me doing a good job. So good! We can be away!

I have worked a lot staring at my computer this winter, because I've had to re-establish our savings, and earn enough to live here (rent was twice was it was in the city). The whole reason I have been wanting to get us on the road and wwoofing was for our health... well, winter in this mountain town, working my guts out, has only made me gain 20 pounds. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I have a dragon in the mountain here and I feel like she's been taking care of me pretty well. Except for the weight I seem mainly healthy. I'm not sure if youse all can see her in Cascade Mountain, but here she is:

 

When I lived in Fernie I loved looking at my hound dog in Mount Hosmer, and here in Banff it's my dragon in Cascade. I'm grateful to that dragon.