The Big
One:
Taking the
Kids on A Year- Long Trip
We've probably all had the fantasy... Chuck the jobs, sell the house, and head out on an odyssey with the kids.
Brave souls make these marathons far and wide: wandering footloose through Asia, for instance. (Check the Thorn Tree, at Lonely Planet, for advice.)
Another approach is to get some sort of motorhome. And, this being the new milleniums, some bold soujourners are also downloading and even uploading as they go.
Odysseys
Online: The Beast
One such family is the
Blondins: homeschoolers with three kids who set
out on "the world's longest field trip", a nine-month
ramble across the U.S.
The Blondins enrolled their kids in a science and technology charter school and with the school board's blessing (and loan of a laptop) set off in a "school on wheels"-- a 34-foot motor home nicknamed "The Beast". Building a website about what they learned was a key part of their plan.
Dad Mark, in an interview, describes an "intense" pace: "going to 'school', navigating, building the Web site, and doing the mundane activities like groceries, laundry, banking, maintenance, and more... It's like a job, but the hours are longer."
Traveling and living together in the motor home's 180-square feet of space, five people can get on each other's nerves, Mark admits. "The sanity and the integrity of our family have been maintained by spending most of our time outside 'the Beast,' " he said. The Beast has a broken hinge on the refrigerator, outside bay door handles that don't work properly, needs a wash and wax, has two dysfunctional screws that are designed to hold down the sofa and needs a spare tire. The sleeping arrangements for them are compact. Kelly and Stacy share a fold-out coach, while Donald gets the fold-down table. As the trip progressed, a jealousy arose over mom and dad's bed, which is pretty nice, Mark said. |
"Techno
Travels"
Another marathon family is Mary Purpura and Paolo Pontoniere and
their six children: who also set out to use high tech for education on the
road (and wrote about it
at the LA Times website).
These marathoners had a $94,654 motor home (with hydraulic pop-out room), equipped with three cell phones, a couple of laptops and printers, digital camera, digital video camera-- and they regretted not towing the family minivan.
| Excerpt from the Travel Diary: "Maybe we can get $500 and buy this forest, so we can live in the RV all the time and play Pooh sticks every day." (Silvano, 5) "I'm not really going to like going back to our house that much, because traveling around is more fun." (Eli, 8) "A girl could fall in that toilet." (Lucia, 4, refusing to use the pit toilets at Umpqua Dunes) "Sister Moon is in the sky." (Flavia, 2) And once back home: "Now we don't have to worry about whether or not our black water tank is full." (Eli, 8) |
Wonderful as the trip was, a few cautions apply:
| ...only two real RV greenhorns could have designed
such an ambitious outing... There was so much we didn't know when we first drew up the travel schedule: how much longer it takes to get places in a 35-foot motor home than it does in a mini-van, our family car; how time-consuming it is to set up and break down camp in an RV; how much time it took on this trip to do tasks we normally take for granted, such as grocery shopping and doing the laundry... how often we'd need to replenish certain resources, like water and propane gas; and how much time and energy it took to repeatedly try to find a phone line so we could do the work we needed to do. |
The
Adventure Truck
Finally, for a very different
flavor, try the extensive voyages of the Blickley family, who took a four-month trip Family Camping in
Central America in
"The Adventure Truck."
|
Previously, the Blickley's had traveled and homeschooled for eight months in Europe and northern and western Africa. Anyone planning to cross the Sahara take note:
Through the mountain passes and in the big boulder fields it was necessary to use the main trail going up, over, and down each corrugation while knowing that each stress lowers the chance of completing the journey intact... Shock absorbers can rarely stand the strain. Other problems are obvious given the many car bodies. .. One evening Bill noticed that the left brake line on the trailer had broken off and the seal on the front axle of the jeep was leaking. He made repairs but didn't notice that the trailer axle was bent slightly. The next morning we heard a loud thud and saw the trailer wheel roll past us... We were 250 miles south of In Salah, and miles north of Tamanrasset! |
Get Ready
All right, you're rarin' to go. You merely need to educate yourself about:
RV's, motor-homes, camping etc;
homeschooling;
mobile computing. Here's
some good starting points.
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