In a previous post, I explained how it came to be that my son (S) enrolled in an online remote school in order to compress 7th and 8th grade into one school year.
This was a locationally liberating step. I’ve talked to homeschooling families who spent the year after the pandemic road-tripping around the entire United States, because they could. Although we homeschooled the schoolyear after the pandemic, we still had jobs, which limited how much we could travel. We did spend a couple of weeks in Mammoth in Oct of 2020, which was amazing despite the wildfire smoke funneling over the ridge from the Creek Fire. Then S enrolled back in public school for the first (6th) grade of middle school in the ’21-’22 school year.
When S enrolled in the online Laurel Springs School for 7th grade in the fall of ’22, I was newly retired and conceivably not as pinned down. I talked to a couple of veteran LSS parents about their experience. One family was completely shut-in due to a family member being immunocompromised. At the other extreme, a family had spent the past 10 years cruising around the world on a sailboat. As long as assignments were submitted and tests were taken, the student could be anywhere.
S and I settled on a few relatively short trips, because dad, friends, and activities such as tennis were at home. We also stuck to Europe and the US because I wanted a low-stress travel experience where we could be self-reliant with my limited travel-savvy.
S was taking World History as part of 7th grade social science in the fall, and US History for 8th grade in the spring. So we made two trips to Europe in the fall, and one to the east coast in the spring. In addition to the history trips, S spent an extra long winter break with his grandparents in Hawaii. In March we drove out to Indian Wells and enjoyed the cheaper weekday professional tennis games while camping nearby. For “spring break” we went to Moab, UT and hiked. We spent June in Croatia, where S fit in windsurfing and tennis.
In regular school, in part because California schools receive money based on each student’s attendance, no absences at all are permitted without a doctor’s note. Parents get informational email about absences being linked to bad outcomes. But let’s say that’s probably mostly correlation, not causation. If a student goes and visits grandparents, or travels far from home, is that going to ruin their future?
Normally all of the non-school stuff happens during short school breaks or the summer, when airfare and hotels are expensive, and the weather is often too hot or too cold, depending on when/where one goes. With remote schooling, S and I could go in the shoulder/off season.
We decided to seize the opportunity to go on “history” trips; the main focus would be on history museums. We wouldn’t have to worry about seeing the most popular tourist attractions, which even in the off season can have long queues. It was a working vacation in the sense that S would be doing schoolwork for at least part of the day most days, but he’d still get to experience being in different countries.
Northwest Europe (Sept-Oct)
We flew into London, then traveled by train to Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Linköping (where my German host sister lives in Sweden), and Stockholm, then flew to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam flew back home.
Visiting all the history museums was really cool because:
- – you got the same wars/events from different perspectives
- – you realized all the histories went something like:
(stuff happened) -> (Napoleon scrambled everything) -> (things were never the same) - – you saw how each country dealt with their colonial history, which varied from very apologetic (most) to sweeping things a bit under the rug (Portugal — visited on the following trip).
Not needing to visit anything except the history museums was liberating. In Paris we met with friends who suggested we should go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. That was a lot of standing in line, and sure, one should do that once in life at least, but if you are on a history tour you don’t *have* to do it right then. History museums are less crowded (e.g. the Army Museum and City Museum in Paris) and not having to stand in line or visit all the sights saved time for doing school work or just enjoying being in a different place.
Even museums with a lot of ancient history loot were reasonably to get into in the shoulder season: the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. With advance ticket purchase, going on weekdays, the wait was short. It’s not lost on me though how convenient it was that all these artifacts from around the world (i.e. “loot”) were on display in these western capitals, where we could see them all at once rather than having to travel all over.
The museums that stuck with us most were more specialized. The Stazi Museum in Berlin, located a bit outside of the center, but easily accessible by transit, is housed in the former secret police headquarters. Room by room it reveals how the Stazi controlled East German society. The DDR museum in the center was also fun, showing some of the propaganda and products households had, but was crowded and noisy. A guided bike tour of the Berlin wall told stories.
I felt particularly accomplished if I managed to plan an activity that in some way connected to things S had learned in or outside of school. I got tickets to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. It being the shoulder season I only had to do so a few weeks as opposed to months in advance. S had read her diary as part of 7th grade English. The visit was a powerful, harrowing experience. We also went to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London to see a fun performance of the Tempest. S and I had read Bill Bryson’s book on Shakespeare together. The British Library (conveniently close to the central train station), had some of the original materials for Beatles songs S had learned to play on guitar.
Besides the Stazi Musem, my favorite museum was the National Museum of Denmark. Remarkably, since prehistoric times, the Danes would throw significant objects in the bog, where they were perfectly preserved. Spears, jewelry, ceremonial metal wind instruments, seized Roman weapons, everything was thrown into the bog millennia ago, then dug up and placed in this museum. It was stunning. Artifacts, eroded and corroded in every other museum, are whole in this one.
Spain and Lisbon (December)
In December, we wanted to stick to warmer regions, while saving Italy for a trip with relatives the following year. Spain has an unbelievable (to us Americans) high speed rail system. We were able to zip across the country in no time, there were no “travel days” because, e.g. the 503km (312 miles, like SF to LA) from Barcelona to Madrid takes 2 hours and 29 minutes. Yes! Same for all the other intra-Spain trips we made. I even attempted to try and book one of the legs on a slow train, I think going from Malaga to Sevilla, and Renfe kept rebooking us on the high speed train. So I gave in.
Spain in the December rain was thoroughly enjoyable. The Naval Museum in Madrid was really something (including a depressing section covering Spain’s military decline). The Maritime Museum in Lisbon has quite a bit of chutzpah, which actually made it quite fun. I appreciated the contrite treatment by the British, Spanish and Dutch of their naval/colonial conquests in their own museums, which I admit is appropriate, but still.
We went to several history museums in Spain’s south (+ Toledo), which ended up being a bit redundant because of the shared history. We did sneak off to non-history museums such as Madrid’s gorgeous and extensive geomineral museum (we’d also been weak and went to the British Natural History Museum while in London on the previous trip).
New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC (May)
The east coast tour was a bit abridged because S didn’t want to miss as much of the activities back home as he had with the trips to Europe. So no Boston. We flew into New York, then took the train to Philly, then DC, then flew back from DC — the travel part was easy. In NYC, the City History Museum told a tight story of the city’s focus on money. The Fraunces Tavern was a nicely small and original space to learn about the American Revolution. Philly had so much good stuff: the Ben Franklin museum, Museum of the American Revolution, Independence Hall, etc. DC of course was chock full of museums, and we visited many.
Should you travel around if happen to not be working and your kid is remote/home schooling? Yes.
I’m glad we made these trips on our own schedule, and not in the hot and crowded summer months. I’m also glad that when the action in an action flick moves to one of the cities we visited, you know, the scene shot from a helicopter (maybe now a drone?), S has the experience of having been there. That now when he is taking World History in high school, and next year when he has US History again, he’s seen some of the original documents and artifacts and the places where things took place. I’m glad that *I* had the excuse to do these tours, because I wouldn’t have without having an excuse to do so, but I’m richer for them.