The Nomadic Four

Fès was a big change from the places we’d been until now. I told the kids to prepare for sensory overload, but nothing can quite prepare you for 39C heat, not to mention the sights and sounds of the city within the Medina. Fès is a beautiful and historic city with the biggest pedestrian-only area in the world. It’s been designated a UNESCO world heritage site and we were so fortunate to spend six nights in the heart of it all. It has more than 9,000 streets and more than 400 neighbourhoods. We stayed in a traditional Dar, which is like a Riad, a house that is opened inwards. It has no windows facing the outside. A Riad has a garden in it while a Dar does not. There is a centre main area when you walk in, which is open all the way to the ceiling and to the outside. Homeschool in the main, centre room: Looking up: Around it are the bedrooms on the second floor, overlooking the main area. There are also small nooks in several rooms that you take a ladder to get to. Here are the kids readi...

It was very strange for the school year to start and not to be part of it. Ella was sad not to be going back, and part of me was sad too; to miss the routine, the cool mornings, catching up with friends. We started homeschooling in the summer to get a head start, knowing that we’ll have some busy days ahead when squeezing it in might be trickier. Here is one of our first homeschool sessions in Auray: And here are the kids’ faces when we told them they had to write book reports. Yes, we are bribing them with cake while we sip coffee. They were not impressed. But they both completed their book reports and presented them to us. They did a fantastic job and were so proud of their work. We are planning to do 144 hours of homeschool and we generally sit down and do two hours at a time. It’s not always easy. I’m not a natural teacher, and I lose patience easily. My experience at school was so different than my kids’. They learn in such a different way than I did, so it’s hard to shift my way ...

We left San Sebastián on September 12 and started heading south. Our destination: Morocco. We first took a bus to Madrid. We hadn’t really planned to spend much time discovering the city, since Jon and I had both been (separately) in our 20s. But once we got to our hotel around 5pm, we decided we needed to stretch our legs after being on the bus for 5 hours. The kids had watched 3 entire movies and were a bit cross-eyed. What else do you do in downtown Europe? We hopped on the subway and hit some of the sights, including the Plaza Mayor and the Mercado de San Miguel (with a small playground in between), where we had tapas for supper and strawberries for dessert. The next morning we got up early and took a train to go further south. It took 7 hours but we finally arrived in La Línea, a city on the southern coast bordering Gibraltar. We headed to England and crossed the border by foot into Gibraltar. Gibraltar is basically a massive rock by the water with a small city nestled in below, c...