Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

It was hard to decide that we wouldn't visit Selma. Each person we met in Montgomery gave us the same advice: go to Selma, walk across the bridge. But some of these experiences don't seem appropriate for the children, no matter how important they are. It has been in the high nineties consistently during our time here and we couldn't see how the kids would make it over the bridge and still have the capacity to comprehend what had happened and what it meant. (Apologies,:if you don't know this history, please look up the Pettus Bridge.) This is the constant debate with this in-person educational experience: confronting the history, in person and on site is more meaningful than reading about it in textbooks. This visit has caused me to consider how to encourage other families (or classes, or schools) to make this journey. But these experiences, these confrontations and emotional or intellectual conflicts, are difficult. I believe we (and by we I mean white Americans eve...

Sorry, folks, nothing clever or witty in this one. We are in Montgomery, Alabama. When we planned this itinerary with a primary focus on visiting national parks, we decided we would visit key sites in the civil rights movement. Then, in April 2018, we learned about the opening of the Legacy Museum by the Equal Justice Initiative and it became clear that Montgomery would be an immutable destination. Now we are here. To prepare, I bought three books that have been incredibly valuable. 1. The Civil Rights Movement for Kids by Mary C. Truck . The book provides descriptions of key characters, settings and moments in a way that is neither cartoonish or encyclopedic. We have found that we can read this to the kids, unabridged, and hold their attention. The book includes activities to help the kids engage with the material in a practical way. It also supports our strategy, which is helping the kids relate to specific individuals, from MLK and Rosa Parks to Emmitt Till, Barbara Johns and...

Let it be not forgotten, dear reader, that we're also trying to educate our kids in a conventional sense. Please picture this: on a typical day, we try to conduct achieve two hours of parallel productivity for four students in the same small space where we have just prepared, consumed and cleaned up breakfast. Most of our activity is online so we are at the mercy of the local wifi, our mobile hotspot or our cell phone hotspots (the latter two being dependent on cell service). It reminds me of when Montana didn't, in a strict sense, have a speed limit. Signs announced "reasonable and prudent" and one local explained that the enforceable limit depended on three conditions: the condition of the road, the condition of the weather and the condition of the officer's marriage. In the name of candor, let's talk about this morning. We were in an RV park with good wifi. When we checked in (yesterday) I noticed that they had a community room next too the office that ...

For starters, I mistakenly thought the Blue Ridge Parkway ended in Asheville, a beautiful small city nestled in the mountainous western region of North Carolina. Not so! We aimed for milepost 380 of the BRP but the roadway doesn't end until MP 469, in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, in Tennessee. Oops. Another mistake was the RV Park where we made a reservation for our arrival. Remember the absolutely gorgeous Stone Mountain State Park I mentioned previously? The one with epic quiet and space for the kids to roam? Yeah, this one had a pool so dirty the bottom was invisible. And a playground with free tetanus. Also, nothing separating our camping pad from the adjacent (45 mph) roadway. Fortunately, we were able to relocate to somewhere much better for the next two nights. Our weekend in Asheville really had two highlights. One was visiting with family. Elise's Uncle Tom and Aunt Martha retired to Asheville to enjoy a view of the mountains and having black bears as neighb...

One picture captures these last few days in the Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia and North Carolina: From an itinerary point of view, here's the recap: Monday: Wake up in Luray, VA. Avoid the northern terminus because there is a 12'9" overpass and we are 12'6" (but told to round up to 13'0"). Enter parkway at MP 90 (after harrowing ascent from Buchanan, VA) and drive four miles north to Peaks of Otter campground. Tuesday: Breakfast and schooling in Peaks of Otter lodge; hike to the top of Sharp Top Mountain. Campfire. Sleep. There's an entire entry dedicated to this day here . Wednesday: Drive south on the parkway for about 25 miles then exit to Roanoke; eat lunch, use laundromat and do school in a dubious parking lot; take interstate into North Carolina and get a little wayward (not lost!) en route to absolultely gorgeous Stone Mountain State Park. Thursday: Return to Parkway via numerous hairpin turns and drive north, back into V...

In case you were curious, Skyline Drive is the primary feature of Shenendoah National Park (with parkland on either side) but Blue Ridge Parkway is synonymous with Blue Ridge Parkway National Park; all the green space on either side is National Forest, State Park/Forest or private land. See, now you know. Although our pre-RV troubles plan was quite different, our new plan put us at Peaks of Otter Campground at milepost 86 of the BRP for two nights. We arrived mid-afternoon on Monday and didn’t have to move the RV again until Wednesday morning. So what does that mean for Tuesday? A big pile of POO, that’s what. There’s a privately operated lodge at POO and just enough cell service in the campground to lure us with the promise of waffles. We loaded up our homeschooling supplies and walked about a mile to the lodge. No waffles. There's the POO Lodge across Abbott Lake  From POO Lodge, the view of Peak #1: Sharp Top Mountain (if you enlarge and zoom, Henry is visible fishing...