Meandering Around the World

I am so not impressed with One World. Their RTW website is terrific, just click on a map and seemingly all your dots are connected. But then when you get to the nitty gritty of picking flights it all goes to hell in a handbag. To get from India to Thailand you have to go via Hong Kong, to go from Thailand to Malaysia, back vou go thru Hong Kong turning an 1 1/2 hr flight into a 9 hr ordeal. Not to mention the constant message “no flights available” meaning you might be stranded in some town for days till a “L” grade seat becomes available. Don’t think we are going to go with this company.

It’s difficult to balance the need for structure with flexibility. With 6 people we may not be able to afford to just jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, especially for the big jumps. On the other hand between Ming and Vincent people may be coming and going at various and random times as we meet up and reconnect. Maybe I should just think of myself and the 3 youngest as one pod and let Vincent and Ming join us as they will. We will probably end up with a skeleton RTW ticket from airtrek which we will fill in with local transport within SEA & SA but it depends on how easy it is to change the itinerary and what the fees will be to do that.

DE desperately wants to go back to his regular summer camp before the trip so that means we can’t leave till August which means it is well & truly only a 12 month trip since we have to arrive back in the states August a year later in order to give us a month to catch our breath and gear up for starting a new school..

Update – as of now, Dec. 2010, we still haven’t bought any tickets but I now think we will just buy the first few leg (NY – London – Estonia) and maybe the flight between China & India. We will be taking trains between Estonia, Russia & China. Once we are in India we will just buy the rest of the tickets as we go along.

So where are we now? Definitely more informed as too the medical side – we have gotten all the ho hum vaccinations that are covered by health insurance and in January will get the ones that are only available from the Travel Health Clinic – Yellow Fever, Japanese Encephalitis and Typhoid; still on the fence about rabies.

We are also farther along on the home schooling side – we have talked to the head of the math dept at the school the kids go to now and to the one at the school the kids will go to when we come back and found out that the kids are basically a year ahead of the new school’s curriculum. I had expected this since they are switching from a private school to a public one. This means we have to decide whether we treat our year of travel as a review year, just making sure they don’t lose what they have already learnt or, on the other hand keep pushing them so they will be still be ahead and go into an accelerated math class when we come back. It doesn’t help that one school uses one curriculum (Prentice Hall) and the other a completely different one (Everyday Math). But all the traveling families I’ve spoken to recommend Singapore math since it is so portable, easy to teach and apparently, pretty fun.
I’m actually leaning towards doing a review year with Singapore math, adding online math games, some enrichment and just make sure they really, really have a secure base without stressing over teaching algebra, etc. What a gift to have them already ahead so they can relax and enjoy the trip. If they whiz though standard 3nd grade & 7th grade math then we can go ahead to the next but no pressure.