Meandering Around the World

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…

January first, a new year, only 7 months till we have to leave. Yikes!

OK, maybe we should try something different, set out a list of all the things that need to be done in the order they need to be done. This month’s resolutions:

1. Get M. into college. Admittedly this is something she has primary responsibility for but it is another two weeks of reading and editing her essays and supplements before the last final college application is due. We just had a slight anxiety attack trying to decide if she should change the essay she already submitted to two colleges to the (seemingly) better essay she is sending off to the next 4. I will be soooo happy when this is over! I will be soooo unhappy if she goes to college in California!

2. Put house on the market – it is pretty clutter free, in fact looks so nice I wish we had actually lived like this for the past 5 years! So just have to choose a realtor and put it into their hands.

3. Get an appraiser out to look at furniture and china. SInce we will be combining households (our rental in the city with our weekend house in the country) we need to downsize or do we really need 3 hutches and 4 highboys?

4. Get WIlls finally done. Yeah yeah, I know, inexcusable but we have actually been in the process of getting them done for a decade, somehow the final signing never gets done!

5. Make a decision as to whether we are going East to West or vice versa. It is fundamentally impossible to get tickets to the Trans-Mongolian Express without going through an agency at the height of the summer season so if we are going to do that we might as well go thru one that will organize our accommodation as well. Unfortunately most of these agencies have an age limit (as in no-one under 12 yrs old). In order to qualify as our own “private tour” that can include the girls we need 8 people. Wellllll, we thought we had that cracked when one of the girls’ best friends (and her parents!) jumped at the chance to ride a train across Russia. But now we have to see if they are ready to commit (we need to buy the train tickets before we can get the letter of invitation to Russia before we can get the visa and before we can get the first plane ticket since it establishes when we need to leave by). But if for whatever reason they decide it was a great idea but no thanks we have decided to flip the trip and start instead in South America instead of ending there. This is nice because then we start with the Galapagos island and what a cool way to begin. Either direction has its merits, we just need to know which direction we are going! This by the way, is why we are not making any promises to meet up with anybody along the way….

6. Contact the home schooling co-ordinator at the kids’ PA school and start working on my presentation. We have to submit a “prospectus” on what the kids will be doing all year in all the usual academic subjects. When we come back they will be examined by an independent evaluator to determine whether or not we hit those goals (and I suppose whether they can re-enter the system?). Not too worried about it but need to start lining up my ducks.

7. Check out the sales and decide what I am going to be using to lug my life around the world.

8. Take down the Xmas tree and all the decorations….

9. Oh yeah, send out New Year’s cards!

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]