Meandering Around the World

For our trip around the world in 2011-12, we went to Borneo, China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia. THen we switched to South America and saw Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia and Costa Rica.

These travels were all charted in our blog
http://dixons.tumblr.com

In August of 2012 we returned to America and settled down in Pennsylvania. But we have not stopped traveling. You can read about our next adventure – training from Eastern Europe to Asia on the TransMongolian Express. We will visit Estonia, Russia, Mongolia and China. Then just for fun we will return via England and Ireland. You can read about this on our blog at
http://www.ainlaydixon.com/blog

It has been quite a stressful week. I have gone to the Chinese embassy three times and still don’t have a visa – Monday it was closed (who knew the masses still celebrate May Day?), Tuesday the line was out the door and up the street so I chickened out. Took Wed off because it was pouring and I am not going to stand in the rain for two hours for nothin. Today, I finally made it inside with all my carefully prepared documents – passports, photos, applications (nowhere, of course, do I mention our plans to visit Tibet, or the fact that Vincent is a photographer). After standing in line for two hours, the @%# lovely lady behind the counter took one glance at my stack of papers and shoved them back at me saying “color!, only color photos”. So I had to crawl away with my apparently completely unworthy black and white visa photos. When I asked her to at least look and see if everything else was in order so I would not have any more surprises tomorrow she refused saying “I don’t know, my supervisor might not like something”. Another woman at the counter was literally crying, she had been sent around to so many different windows so many times.

But that was nothing on the woman from the STA travel agency. Remember STA – Student Travel Agency – it’s been around since I was a teenager needing my first fake ID so you would think they must know what they are doing, right? Their office happens to be two blocks away from my apartment and I have dropped in maybe three times to talk about our trip and tickets with a supposedly sane sales agent there. She kept going on about the value of having this agency behind you – if something went wrong you could just call up an actual live person and they could fix it (someone actually called while I was sitting there who had slept through the once a week flight out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Well, I finally nail down our itinerary, know our dates for at least the first 3 or 4 flights and am ready to bite the bullet and Purchase Tickets. So I spend a while on Kayak.com, figure out some routes I want, see their prices then trot along to STA to reap the great reward of their decades of experience, figuring they will at least match the price if not do much better and then there is all the security of having them there to help little ole me. She takes my list of flights and says she will get back to me.

When she finally does, the next day – her solution is nothing but the exact same routes I had found but costing significantly more, and oh, she forgot to mention the $30 per person booking fee. After I send her an email saying I might only buy one of the tickets with them (the only leg that was the same price as the one I sourced) I then find out that these “discounted” prices are contingent on my buying their travel insurance, otherwise each of those tickets actually costs $100 more per person (and the booking fee). OK, I’ve looked at travel insurance and had almost decided to go with one but wanted to see what STA had to offer. If it was really cheaper it might be worth the extra ticket costs. Um, no, her quote for travel insurance is over $4,000, literally four times the cost of the other insurance. Seriously? I would spend $4,000 to get tickets that are more expensive than the ones I brought to her? I zoom back onto Kayak.com only to find out that the prices I had found two days ago are now gone, some legs are at $300 -$400 more a ticket. So this person not only completely wasted my time but now has lost me serious money (talking tickets for 5 people here).

The moral of the story is – wait for it – Do It Yourself. I finally, with a lot of searching and re-jiggering of flight times, found a ticket that was about the same price as the original one I had wanted and over $1,000 less than the one she “found” for me.

Sigh, but at the end of the day – we’re going to Borneo! It’s done. We are leaving NYC on July 26th and arriving in Kota Kinabalu two days later (with a stopover in Hong Kong)! And from now on I definitely won’t be going to any more travel agencies! But I will be sure to set my alarm clock on travel days….

Ireland

My favorite part of the trip was Dublinia, a Viking Museum. It was interesting and fun, you could dress up as a Viking or a 14th century peasant. We learned about the Black plague and fairs in medieval times and it wasn’t boring.

My second favorite thing was Granny Gertie’s birthday party because I got to see all my cousins and got to celebrate with her, I have 23 Dixon cousins. My father put together a slide show which showed all of my cousins and Grannie Gertie growing up.

My third favorite thing was Fungie the dolphin. We got on a boat and he swam up next to us and played around, jumping in and out of the water. He never leaves dingle bay, he has been here for 28 years.

Notes to self re. our practice run

Vincent lost his wallet containing all his credit cards and, more importantly, his green card on the london underground. We learned a) we should not be carrying the same cards since when he canceled his, my debit card still worked and b) that he (and I) should only carry one card with us with our daily cash. This is something we both knew perfectly well but just hadn’t bothered doing. Ah well.

The kids have been amazingly good in the car. Yesterday we were driving for a grand total of ten hours, admittedly with about four hours of stops but still, there was no squabbling or fussing at all. Poor Miriam regularly gets car sick but she just handles it with a bag and paper towels, no fuss at all. We actually use the travel time as our down time, the kids can read, do their math packet or watch movies on their Itouches, I knit or read and Vincent listens to music while driving. And we actually all chat! So I’m slightly less worried about all those 4 or 5 hours drives people have warned us about (especially in Bhutan!). The reason we were in the car all day yesterday was because we were driving around the Ring of Kerry. We were told it would take from two to four hours to do the whole thing. Another lesson learned – either we travel very slowly or people wildly exaggerate! Admittedly, we did stop for an hour and a half to have a picnic on the beach. While there we made a beehive house in imitation of the primitive stone dwellings that the earliest inhabitants lived in, They are made out of the flat stones that are everywhere here, including the beach. They would just pile stones up like an igloo but so perfectly that they didn’t need any mortar or concrete and it kept the rain out completely. A valuable lesson in how road schooling can be fun! (i.e. note to mom – less on the dragging around monuments and more on the spontaneous creativity)

As far as homework goes, surprisingly David Evan has done a lot of reading, dipping into books instead of his itouch at rest stops. He polished off his assigned book and almost finished a new Alex Ryder mystery. Not surprisingly, it has been a real drag to get him to do his journal and even more so math. Granted we did not have a nice neat math packet for him like we did for the girls so it was more a question of fiddling about trying to find fun, grade appropriate math sites on the Internet but it was not like he was falling over himself to participate. Hopefully with Singapore math we’ll be carrying around what we need and he can go thru the workbooks one lesson at a time.

So far the girls have been fantastic about doing their homework, writing pages in their journals and working through the math packet their teachers gave them. I have even had time to read to them at bedtime (the kindle is a definite keeper for the big trip!). So the only thing they are not doing is reading on their own but I assume they will pick that up more as we travel. They all definitely had a good dose of science from the very hands on, interactive exhibits at both the Science museum and Natural History museum in London, not to mention all the astrology programs they did at the Observatory in Greenich. David Evan especially had a blast setting up the equipment needed for various space exploration expeditions, deciding which specific items were needed and making sure the weight balance was maintained (or else the rocket ship blew up on re-entry!). There was a wonderful table with stars floating across it and if you captured a star with a cone it would immediately tell you something interesting about black holes, nebulas, the birth or death of stars, etc., which the girls loved. All in all we were very impressed with the museums in London! In Ireland we went to Dublinia in Dublin and King John’s Castle in Limerick which were interactive in a completely different way – being able to put on 14th c peasant clothing or hold a Viking battle-ax or simply walk along the battlements of a 12th c castle (or put your sister in the stockade).

We’ve actually pulled together on the fly a kind of school kit that hopefully will be all we need – mechanical pencils, pens, colored pencils, small eraser, sharpener, glue stick, scissors, math dice, ruler, tiny stapler and staples. We will need to bring both lined journals and ones for drawing

We didn’t forget anything earth shattering tho we didn’t bring water bottles which I think we should do on the big trip and we will have to work out day packs for the kids. They definitely need better ones than the ones they have now. Mine, however, worked out much better than I expected. Most importantly, not only did nobody kill anybody, DE and the girls really, really got along and cooperated and that is more reassuring than finding out we could cope without credit cards for two weeks!

This has been a lovely, lovely trip. We have had a fabulous time in Ireland seeing family, especially the kids getting to see and really play with all their cousins. We celebrated his mother’s 90th birthday with a formal luncheon for 100 in a castle that is three times older than the United States of America. The girls have been doting on their tiniest cousin, four year old Ronan, while DE is never happier than sitting with a clutch of his older boy cousins.

Today we drove for about six hours to get from Vincent’s mother’s place in Kilkenny to his sister-in-laws parents’ house in Dingle which they were kind enough to let us borrow. On the way, Miriam got sick twice. We arrived at 8 at night, starving, with no food in the house. Fortunately when David Evan had been sent to the 2 euro store to get snacks for the road he had picked up some instant ramen (seriously, instead of cookies), so that was what we had for dinner. By the time we got everything sorted out it was 9:30 pm and the girls started to completely melt down. We have got to get onto a regular bedtime schedule. But unfortunately, just as I was dealing with them, David Evan calls from the bathroom “I’m throwing up in here, if anybody cares” so then I had to deal with him which of course left the girls out of sorts. Vincent was off dealing with the mess of having lost his wallet and green card. So now the girls are finally in bed, DE is beside me, having mildly puked in a bowl right next to my pillow. Oh, the joy, the unadulterated bliss of motherhood.

But then, “Mommy, I’m cold, can you cuddle me?”. And it really is all worth it.

“Mommy, the museums here are amazing! They make the ones in New York seems pathetic! Can we move here?” This was the general consensus from all three kids, even, unbelievably, my normally museum hating son. I’m definitely taking the downgrading of NYC as good thing since anything that makes leaving easier is a positive thing in my books. But it is true, the Natural Museum in London makes the one in NYC suck eggs. They don’t just have dinosaurs, they have great animatronic ones that move and roar and show the reality of what all those bones actually would have looked like in the flesh. Everything, and I mean everything is interactive. You walk by a glass wall and it wakes up and starts asking you questions about coral and jellyfish. We spent hours in the Darwin Center where you pick up little credit card like thing that you can swipe at each exhibit and download information that you can bring back to your own computer at home. We had one stop where we planned a field expedition to the jungle to study bugs and had to work out what kind of equipment we would need to bring. At another stop we talked to an actual scientist who was cataloging a new type of plant that had just been brought back from Bolivia and they were hoping they could use its DNA to create potatoes that could grow in Holland’s salty water. We also saw a movie about evolution that had 3 D holograms walking across the room in front of us (the kids really enjoyed learning we are related to bananas!). We also went to the earthquake room where at first I thought they had set up an exhibition about the terrible destruction that just happened in Japan but eerily it was a model of a Japanese supermarket based on the 1980s earthquake in Kobe. As you stood there the room and all the groceries on the shelves would shake while video of the actual store rolled and sound effects blared. Maybe other times It would be strictly academic but given what had just happened it was a little too close to reality! The older parts of the museum were stunning as well in a great 19th c naturalist style. We were there for 6 hours and didn’t get thru all of it.

The next day we went to the Science Museum which also had some great interactive exhibits and the next day we took a boat up the Thames to go visit Greenich which is “where time begins”. We spent a lot of time at the Observatory and played lots of games at the Astrology exhibits. I realized that every other time we have come here it was usually at Xmas or Easter or some transit point to somewhere else and all we did was see family. We never really left the house! So this is the first time we have really taken advantage of all that London has to offer and it is great! We definitely want to come back here much more often and it as been wonderful seeing family as well as museums. It is just now the kids are old enough to really appreciate what they are experiencing. Nothing can beat a big crowd of cousins though and David Evan especially has loved getting to know his older boy cousins (such a relief after always being surrounded by girls!). We have been staying with Vincent’s brother and sister in law who have 3 kids and who have been beyond wonderful, Sheila especially cooking up amazing dinners every night. We did have a big night out with my sister and her family which is even bigger than ours so we basically took over the local restaurant and had a fabulous time which some how got turned into agreeing to do it all over again in June with their coming to NYC for our farewell party. Hopefully that will last past the inebriation stage.

So, England goes down as huge success, next stop Ireland…

Vincent’s mother is turning 90 this year and so the entire Dixon clan are throwing a huge party. In a Castle no less, the actual 600 year old Butler Castle in Kilkenny. Should be quite a show. Anyway, it turns out to be perfect timing, right smack in the middle of 3 out of the 4 children’s Spring Break from school so we decided to make a real trip of it and spend a week in London and a week traveling around Ireland. For some reason we haven’t been back to London in eight years, since before the girls were born, even though my sister and Vincent’s brother both live there. Of course we are thinking of it as a dress rehearsal for our big trip even though this one is mostly geared around seeing family and we will have to be bringing fancy clothes which obviously would not be required in the RTW backpacks! It will give us a tiny taste of what we need to brush up on. So far I think we can get away with even smaller backpacks than what we have – both the girls are sharing one, David Evan has his own which seems to be primarily filled with nerf guns and mine is half filled with presents. But then comes Dad with his two huge cases! He keeps saying he won’t be bringing all this stuff on the actual RTW trip but I’ll believe it when I see it. The only problem is that we might end up with a false sense of security since getting around England and Ireland is such a breeze. We will pick up our sim card for the phone at the airport and we can probably get an oyster card to ride the tube the same day so we will have transport and communication sorted as soon as we arrive. Ah well, it is supposed to be an actual holiday after all….

It is amazing to me how devil-may-care I was the first time I went off on a trip around the world. I temped in an office for a few months, made about $2,000, went to a tiny little hole in the wall bucket shop and bought a RTW ticket and got on a plane.

And. That. Was. It.

Now, I’m sorting out visas, packing up houses, booking vaccinations around baseball games, and filing leave of absence forms from formal schooling. What kills me however is the tiny little things that trip you up.

I had found out that one of the requirements for homeschooling is a standardized test in 3nd grade. Well, it just so happens my girls will be missing third grade. So I thought, let’s get ahead of the program and take the test before we leave rather than that being the first welcome back after our year away. So I found out which tests were acceptable and how they were administered. I found out some could be administered by the parent themselves so long as the parent had a college degree. Great, no problem, until I tried to actually register and discovered I had to PROVE I had a B.A. by sending the testing center a copy of my degree. Now I don’t know about you but I did not frame the dang thing and hang it in my bathroom. In fact the last time I saw said sheepskin was when it was pressed into my hand 30 odd years ago. So far, everyone has just pretty much believed me when I wrote it on my resume. But I think, no problem, I’ll just call my old college and have them send me a new one. Hah! Seems you have to jump thru a few hoops first, sending in “letters of inquiry” and filling out affidavits and “signed consent forms” ( and paying fees) and you still don’t get an actual copy, just a piece of paper on “official” stationary saying this person did in fact go to this bloody stupid school. I lost strength just on the first go round. Maybe I can gear up again in a few days. Or maybe we will find out what happens to kids who arrive in 4th grade without ever having taken the bloody stupid 3nd grade test.

Then this week I thought, well, we have a little time to kill, lets get the vaccinations over with. I knew some of them take three doses and over a month to finish. I also knew from checking with my kids’ pediatrician that she could give the rabies vaccination (and thus save $1,000s of dollars since it would be covered by insurance) but she couldn’t give the yellow fever ones. Those could only be given by licensed travel clinics. So I call her up to say, let’s get started on those rabies shots and her secretary says sure, they will give me a prescription to take to the pharmacy to get filled. Huh? They don’t actually have the vaccine, they will just administer it. So I call the pharmacy to say, I have this prescription for a vaccination against rabies, can you fill it?and actually, no, they cannot and neither can any other of the big pharmacies around town. Well, That’s a quandary. OK I thought, let me check with the Travel Clinic after all and that’s fine they have plenty of that vaccine and all the others. So great, but when I tell them the age of my kids they say, oh no, we are not allowed to give shots to anyone under 18. So my ped can give the shot to my kids but doesn’t have the actual stuff and the clinic has the actual stuff but can’t give it to my kids. Sigh….

This is what my days are filled with now…

We are going to London and Ireland over our Spring Break. It is Vincent’s mom’s 90th birthday and the whole Dixon clan is getting together which should be lots of fun. We are starting off in London to stay with my sister-in-law and visit my sister then fly to Ireland. After the big birthday bash we will do a drive around the Ring of Kerry so we are in for a full two weeks. Hopefully we can use it as an excuse to iron out any kinks before the big trip. I’ve told them (the kids) they will have to do math and journaling everyday. We will see how painful it is! Sadly Ming does not have her break then so will have to stay in NYC with her dad and keep going to school. But it is her time to hear back from colleges anyway so she probably would be too distracted to enjoy anything anyway.

Our last break was Presidents Day which we spent clearing out and packing up our weekend house and it is now spick and spam, ready for the market. I got into such a roll, I started clearing out closets and shelves here in the city as well and learned two immutable rules. 1) your children will have no interest in toys they have not played with in years until you try and get them out the door and 2) even if you pack up two van loads of stuff and cart them off, you will not be able to see on whit of difference.

OK, I exaggerate. The place is a bit clearer and actually the kids have been very good. The girls are very enthusiastic about the trip and even David Evan is sloooowly beginning to believe me that we will be seeing a lot more monkeys than monuments or museums (although I have heard there is a very good exhibit on different tribes in Sarawak, shhhh!).

Of course the first thing people ask me when I tell them we are taking our kids around the world is “are you going to teach them yourself?” with a tone somewhere between “are you insane” and “thank god that’s not my problem”. I usually give a pretty flip response that we are going to keep them up with their maths and they will be keeping daily journals but other than that learning will take care of itself. But in truth I’ve been researching the hell out of home schooling and vacillate between being worried about keeping them focused enough to maintain the bare minimal amount of work and worried that I cannot stop myself from piling more on! It is going to be hard to be the one responsible for the discipline day in and day out, especially when I might not be particularly interested in doing math that day anyway.

On the other hand, this is just a year, we are not yanking them out of school forever and they are still in relatively early grades and able to make up things pretty quick. So the other side of the coin is taming my desire to make everything “educational”. We went down that road in Italy where there was just a few too many museums and churches! Some museums they love – any science or natural history museum with buttons they can push and levers they can move – fantastic! They still rate the Leonardo De Vinci exhibit in Venice as one of the best places they went because they were able to try out all of his mechanical inventions. But they will never forget the torture of being pulled through the Musee d’Academia. I keep telling them there is no equivalent of a Louvres or Hermitages in Laos or Cambodia so stop worrying! But, conversely, I will also not be visiting as many temples or watts as I would on my own. Forts and “old places” will need to be negotiated.

I was very intimidated by one homeschooling mom I spoke to who had designed an intensely elaborate academic curriculum for english, history and science – complete with research projects and papers for the year they were away. I really can’t see doing that and getting any enjoyment at all out of our trip..

Some overarching topics such as world religion or colonialism will be discussed as we move and geography will be pointed out as we cross over mountains and drift down rivers. Writing will primarily be journals and maybe blogging (emails would be nice too but I have a feeling they will prefer sykpe). I am trying to find books for them to read set in the countries we visit. It was a huge relief to find out David Evan would be missing Biology the year we are away since that is the one thing he will be learning about in spades via nature reserves, jungle sanctuaries and above all by visiting the Galapagos Islands.

Sometimes I think – eh, the internet and youtube will make everything a snap. You can google any historical fact and there are so many math games or homework help sites out there I think we can probably just stumble along. Sometimes I think, wait, Miriam has to work on writing creative stories, Leontine will miss learning to research a big project and David Evan is ready for algebra! Aie! What are we doing!? In the end I just keep telling myself – how lucky we are to be doing this BEFORE David Evan hits high school. It’s really the last chance I would feel comfortable doing it.