The Nomadic Four

We’ve been travelling for about six weeks now, and planning our trip for over a year. And even though we’ve mapped out our route and planned all our flights and accommodations, there are a lot of things we still need to arrange, such as transportation (buses and trains between cities), since those you can only book a few weeks or months in advance. We also learned in France, that if you wait too long to reserve, the trains fill up quickly. So in the evenings, Jon is constantly researching and then discussing the best options with me before booking things, usually about a month out. We’re also trying to plan our day-to-day adventures, when we’re going out exploring or trying to figure out the details of how to get to tomorrow’s destination. Needless to say, it’s a lot of work and sometimes things creep up on us and catch us off guard. In Spain, we had to pivot due to the fires, and because we couldn’t go into the mountains as planned, we decided to visit a beach one day instead. We had ...

We spent four days in Portugal during our Spanish road trip. We hadn’t originally planned to visit this country, but we had a few extra days to fill and were so close, we said, why not? It was definitely worth the small detour. We found a lovely Airbnb about an hour east of Porto, near a quaint town called Amarante with a very cool rock bridge on the river that you can walk across. We stayed in a small bungalow (one of three) on the owner’s property, on a steep hill overlooking a river. We were able to swim and paddle board, which was so nice because it was hot - about 30 C. We caught up on some homeschooling (more on that later… I’m not procrastinating, I promise) and took some time to enjoy the property. We also spent a day in the Douro Valley, the area where much of Portugal’s wine and Port come from. It’s about a 40 minute drive from where we were staying. This area is absolutely incredible. First of all, it was scorching hot… about 33 C the day we were there. The views in the vall...

When we planned this adventure, we intentionally picked 2025 as the year to go, based on how old the kids would be (11 and 8). We talked about delaying by a year; I was concerned that Theo would be too young to remember, appreciate and keep up. But we knew that if we waited too long, Ella would be too old, and too into her social life and activities. Taking her out of school in Grade 6 would also be better than Grade 7. In the end, I think we made the right call. Theo has surprised us immensely. He can keep up with our walking (we are a family of fast walkers, we’ve discovered recently) in both pace and stamina. Ella was sad to leave her friends and complained a lot about leaving as the trip drew near, but she has done really well since we got here, and has completely embraced the experience. She is open to trying new food, appreciates how unique this opportunity is and realizes that five months is going to go by fast. Plus she has been able to keep in touch with her friends through Me...

We had a rocky start to our time in Spain, for a couple of reasons, but it’s shown the kids how we sometimes need to deal with unexpected situations, adapt and make the most of it. Firstly, our final train in France, which took us to the border town of Hendaye, was about 30 minutes behind schedule. This was somewhat ironic, because the trains in France had been so punctual until then, but this ended up delaying us by several hours. Because of the late train, we missed our connecting bus. Luckily we found some very friendly and helpful people in Spain who helped us find a later bus, but we had to make a connection. And that put us even further behind schedule. We had to deal with a massive sea of soccer fans heading into the stadium beside the bus station in Bilbao at game time, which also delayed things. We got our rental car 15 minutes before the rental car company closed, but we only got to our final destination, Llanes, at 10pm. The kids had fallen asleep in the car and we missed di...