A few days in Vancouver - then off we go!

September 14
I am writing from the plane on the way to Tokyo. We just had a whirlwind of 3 days in Vancouver where we completed some of the last minute details. I was very happy to know that one of our cats, Pepper, was going to stay in our friends place for the year. She has settled in and that has taken a load off my mind. The other cat unfortunately ran away a few weeks ago. That has been hard for all of us as we love her dearly. She may still return, who knows. Meanwhile we know that she has found somewhere she can settle.

We spend Friday attending to the schooling programs for the kids. Caleb will be doing Grade 8, a full load of interesting courses, all offered online. We left the Vancouver Learning Network, the section of the school board responsible for distance learning, with an arm full of books however. That freaked us out a bit. As soon as I got in front of the computer, I managed to rid ourselves of everything. First of all the Science book was all available online, the socials text inforamtion was all provided by the instructor online and we photocopied the few pages he needed from the books for the English portion.

Artemis is also enrolled in a distance learning program. The councillor working with her is very excited for us as he has travelled backpacking extensively around the world. We came up with all sorts of interesting projects for her to work on over the year. How are we going to actually get any home work done? We hope to spend a few hours in the mornings. There will obviously be times when doing anything will be impossible and there will be times when we are more settled somewhere and the kids can spend some time catching up. All in all I think its going to be fun as much of the course material they have will be related to places we are going and things we are doing.

The main reason for us heading back to Vancouver for a few days however was to attend Caleb's 2 best friends Barmizfah. All day Saturday we celebrated with them. It was a very touching event that we are extremely happy to have been a part of. Noah and Jesse have been around our family and home for years, it was an event not to be missed. Although Caleb also wants to have a Barmitzfah once we return, I think being a part of his friends has solidified any fears he may have had about taking part in his own.

So we are off on the International portion of our adventure, not to return to Vancouver for a year. We are all travelling with small backpacks, scaled down to the bare minimum, we have various electronic devices to keep us in touch with everyone and most importantly we are eager and excited to be embarking on this amazing adventure.

Lianna