We are ready to leave.  Really ready. In just a little over a week we will be on the plane to Estonia, our first plane trip in over 10 months. Its like a heroin addict jonesing for a fix.  Mind you, I have to acknowledge that we are a lot softer this time out. Soft beds, hot showers and walk in closets have made this past year very comfortable. I really appreciate the eight pillows on my bed! We are also not going to be eating as well as last year - Russian food doesn’t have a patch on Asian street noodles and let’s not even start on the Mongolian diet. So I am trying to temper the wild “let’s go!” with a dose of “it’s not all going to be glorious.”

On the other hand, we are traveling with carry on bags as opposed to the full sized rollies we left with last year.  In fact, the girls’ bags are technically backpacks for school but the kind with wheels.  So we should be much lighter and nimbler. The emails we are getting from guides in Mongolia recommending bringing sleeping bags and foam pads are not even being considered - either they provide what is needed or we just pick them up there (we will be bringing one blow up pillow each, we are not animals).  

Russia’s itinerary is pretty much set, Mongolia’s not at all, China has been chopped off to only 4 days so basically down to eating peking duck and seeing the Great Wall.  Our first stop is Estonia and I haven’t planned anything for that since we are going to be with a great friend who, we assume, knows her way around her native country.  Our last stops are England and Ireland and between family and well loved museums, we generally know our way around what we want to do in each place. I am trying to ignore the fact that I will not be able to either speak or read the language in 4 out of the 6 countries we visit. Not to mention that neither Russia nor China has much of a reputation for being particularly welcoming to the independent tourist and while Mongolians are apparently supremely friendly, they have practically no travel infrastructure at all.  It will be fine!

One brand new twist to this trip will be couch surfing.  Russia is eye bleedingly expensive, especially compared to all the super cheapie places we were going through last year.  On the advice of another traveler I looked into this system whereby you stay at locals’ own apartments for free.  The general idea is: you are staying with people who for one reason or other hope to one day be in a position to ask you to host them so it is one large round of pay it forward. Primarily inhabited by very enthusiastic 20 somethings, they seem to be people willing to share their spaces with complete strangers just for the fun of it and there is nothing they like more than meeting people from out of town. While Leontine’s reaction to this philosophy was to remind me how I told her not to speak to strangers on the internet, there is a lot of communication and feedback among the various hosts so I feel fairly confident with the ones I’ve picked, or rather asked, to stay with. I do think it is funny that I am doing this first before my 19 year old daughter who prefers the hostel route.

She, btw, is traveling on her first solo trip this summer. She is going to spend one month in Italy, basing her itinerary primarily on the foods she wants to taste.  Basically, she is sourcing her grocery list with the odd stop in a church or museum. I am so proud of her and absolutely confident she will find her way around and keep us enraptured with her travel stories. But I will miss her travel companionship.

So, onward and upwards. 

There comes a time in every trip prep where you are just done with the planning.  Especially with a convoluted trip like this with multiple countries over two months.  There is, necessarily, at least one intensive stage where you have to lock down the logistics of coming and going (and who is coming and going - still not entirely settled...).  By now, I have booked (and paid!) for flights over to Europe and back from Asia and the train segments leading from Estonia to China. But, in order to do that I have spent weeks pouring over guide books to figure out potential routes and exactly how many days to spend in each town and city we were potentially passing through.  I do hate that we are booking the train tickets in advance but given it is high season and the must popular route through Russia, we really don't have a choice. And I want to know if I really want to spend 7 days in St. Petersburg and 4 in Moscow or vice versa.  It is like a puzzle where we have to fit all the places we want to visit into the time frame we have and not feel squished.  I can look on line and I can read blogs but there is nothing like a guidebook with their "top ten highlights" and "4 day Itineraries" and handy maps to really give you the lowdown on what there is to do and see in each city. And since, of course, we can't see everything, it is the quickest way of slicing and dicing our itinerary. Sometimes we make decisions based on those lovely words "most tourists don't stop here".  We are taking the southern loop of the Trans Siberian railway instead of the northern one for just that reason.  And because it means we can stop at Kazan - the capital of Tatarshan, a sovereign republic in the Russian Federation.  Love the idea of visiting a "Stan" while not even leaving Russia.

But, I now have "guidebook enteritis".  I've read so much about where we are going I no longer want to go there. I feel like I've already been there! Too much information.  My husband never reads guidebooks until he has left the place they are covering.  He says he can't understand them until he has seen what they are talking about. I'm not quite at the point of throwing away all guidebooks but I am going to take a rest for a while and enjoy living in the present instead of planning for the future.  Spring has just arrived in our neck of the woods and it is pretty glorious indeed. I could imagine lots of people wanting to come visit here and take a break just admiring these kinds of spring blossoms. 

Now that we have plane tickets, the second step is visas.  One of the true joys of being an American is that we generally breeze through this process.  If we want to visit Paris or London or Dublin we just show up at the airport and they happily wave us through.  Other places like Argentina or Cambodia ask us to pay a fee, fill out some forms and then wave us through.  But a few, a select few, do make life difficult.  Not as difficult as the American government does to other nationals trying to get to Disney Land, mind you. While we have to fill out some forms and glue on an itty bitty, inevitably unflattering photo, people applying for a visa to come here have to provide affidavits from their local police department and medical records as well as proof of employment and bank records.  So I am not complaining. I had a friend from Indonesia who tried many times to get a visa.  He was at that awkward stage between being a student and owning his own business or having inherited/earned enough money to own land or buildings.  Not having a wife or children to leave behind as collateral, the US officials simply assumed he would never return home and denied him a visa. This is more generally the case than not. 

However, of all the countries in the world besides ours, the two most intimidating are Russia and China.  First of all, they keep changing the rules.  This is the third time I have applied for a Chinese visa and I still don't have it down yet.  Now, apparently, we need a letter of invitation to enter the country.  Or is just presenting an actual flight ticket in and out of the country enough? Do we need a complete itinerary or not?

I'll get to that later because I can't apply for my Chinese visa until I get my passport back from the Russian consulate who are presently perusing it. I will break the actual steps needed to get a Russian visa down later but for now, let me just say, it is an exercise in cultural communication. Without even stepping one foot into the country I feel I have already glimpsed how my three weeks there will go. One the one hand, they are the most nitpicky, persnickety officials I have ever had to deal with.  On the other hand, there is no official obstacle that cannot be cleverly circumnavigated .

The first thing that flummoxes most travelers to Russia is the need for an official "Letter of Invitation", hereafter known as an LOI. If you aren't presently being invited to Russia by either a person or a business, never fear.  There are hundreds of organizations in Russia that are more than willing to invite you.  Twenty dollars and twenty minutes will get you a legitimate "Visa Support document". If you've booked a hotel they can send you one, if you've booked a tour or ticket in Russia, that agency can invite you.  Or you can just go to one of the many, many websites specifically set up to help you like Real Russia or GotoRussia.

Once you have your LOI, you are set to apply.  The first thing you need to know is the Russian consulate no longer actually handles the application.  Yes, that's right, they have farmed it out to a visa application business who will take your form, check it over and when everything is in order, send it to the consulate to be stamped.  For this service they of course need to be paid, so you will have to add on, at minimum, an extra $30 to the standard $140 (for Americans) visa fee. If you want to do it by mail or faster than the standard 10 business days then, of course, the fee will be much, possibly much, much higher.

Now mark my words, no matter how precisely you fill out the application, they will find something wrong with it; a spelling error, wrong punctuation, something. Mine was rejected because I had not realized my LOI had written (in cyrillic) the names of the hotels I was supposedly staying at during my three weeks in Russia.  I had, myself, picked various hotels randomly out of a guidebook and put them down (in english) on my application.  Now the agent looking over my papers was not at all bothered that the facts were blatantly false (as in I clearly was not going to be staying at hotels I didn't know about).  All she cared was that the forms did not match.  But, for $25, she could retype my entire application replacing my hotels with the cyrillic ones mentioned on the LOI. Note, this was $25 per visa per family member since they ALL had to match, not a one time thing. I still don't know the names of the hotels we and the kids are supposedly staying at.

So, nitpicking, yet surprisingly flexible. As in, everybody knows this is a complete scam but if you do not dot the i's and cross the t's we are going to pretend this is a very big deal.  Until it's not, because with a little extra money, it can all go away.  Or as the website for the agency that now handles all things Russian visa says - "it has become a very comfortable and pleasant procedure." Trust the system, you will get a visa.  Eventually.

We have tickets, we are going! Three huge countries - Russia, Mongolia and China. If only.  Naturally, it has gotten a tad more complicated (spiraled out of control). First, we have a friend from Estonia, a good friend,  She happens to be going back to her home country to show off her new baby.  Her home town, Tallinn, is only four hours by train from St. Petersburg.  It's right next door! So, why not? How could we pass up this opportunity to be shown around Estonia by a proud native?

Just as I was about to click on the buy button for tickets, my hubby casually mentions, oh by the way, the Dixon family reunion is happening in Ireland just after we arrive back in the states.  Ah, ok, let's think about this. Back to Kayak.com and rework the multicity tickets.  It is absolutely ridiculous to fly back from Asia to USA and then turn around and leave for Europe so....we are now going straight from Beijing to London.  There we will spend some time with my family before jetting off to Ireland to meet up with the giant Dixon clan.

So, in a nutshell, here is the plan - Estonia, Russia (including Siberia), Mongolia, China, England and Ireland in just over two months.  How did this happen? Emmm, what happened to one month, one country? It's just that that they are each right next to each other, how can we not keep going in a single straight line from Eastern Europe to Asia?  Yes, I realize the England/Ireland bit is at the end instead of in the beginning, but doesn't it make a beautiful (almost) straight line? Completely logical, no?

Ah, it will not be so bad, since we will basically be following the tried and true Trans Mongolian route, jumping on and off the train as we see fit.  The train routes are so extensive and omnipresent that even though it will be high season I don't think we will have any trouble getting tickets.  All the Moscow-Beijing tickets will be sold out but the little hops in between on the less fancy trains will still be available.

And that, my friends, might fall under the heading of "wishful thinking".  We will find out!

You know when I found out that I was going to have twins, instead of being overwhelmed, I just thought "well, I've had a girl and I've had a boy.  What else is there to do but have twins." I never like to do the same thing twice.  If I know how to do something then I have to up the ante.  

So, having spent a little over a year traveling around Asia and South America, what to do, where to go next?  Of course! The one country that still legally requires an invitation to enter, is millions of miles wide and we can't even read the signs. I am speaking of course, of Russia.

But if we are going to Russia, why not do the whole Transiberian thing and train down through Mongolia to China?  I mean, it's right there!  And its not like any more people speak english in those countries! So it is set.  We are going to spend mid June to mid August meandering from Russia to Mongolia to China.

I am not completely phased by the complete inability to communicate, let alone but, ok, yes, it is a little daunting not to be able to translate a menus or a street sign.  So when I saw our local mainline school night was offering a beginning Russian class I signed up hoping I could teach myself to decipher the cyrillic code.  This should help not only in Russia but also in Mongolia which uses the same alphabet. Mandarin? Forget about it.  I'm just assuming that since we will be mostly in or near Beijing, we will find enough english speakers to give us a break.

So now to the planning stages.  I've bought the guidebooks and have roughed out the direction we want to go - from west to east.  We want to end up in China because then, maybe, my son will deign to join us after he has had his mandatory, not to be tampered with stint in his beloved summer camp.  This means I will be traveling through Russia and Mongolia with just the girls.  Possibly just the youngest since my oldest daughter may be holding down a summer job.  My only chance of convincing the dear boy to travel with us is to tempt him with Chinese food which he loves. Russian borscht  would definitely not do the trick.  Anyway it will be nice to end with a bang on the Great Wall.

OK, baby steps, have to start researching plane tickets, visa requirements for Russia and China and maybe, try to find someone out there who has had a good experience buying train tickets on the ground as they went around instead of in advance.  All aboard! 

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The one question absolutely guaranteed to be be asked when you say you are traveling around the world with your kids is “what about school?”. 

You know what I discovered about homeschooling for a year? There is no better way to teach your teenage son to joyfully embrace academics then force him to be be with his parents 24/7.  These days, he literally leaps out of bed to catch the school bus carrying him off to his personal sanctuary. I am also personally grateful that we took this trip last year since I am discovering 4th grade math might be above my grade level.  I could handle multiplication and division but start to throw in ratios and I lose interest fast.

But in all seriousness, homeschooling in the states is a breeze. Many parents do not even have this option. If you live in Germany, Greece or Sweden, it is illegal to take your child out of school for a year.  In Bulgaria you can homeschool only if you have a special needs child, in Ireland only if the parent is a certified teacher. So count your blessings. The United States allows homeschooling in whatever state you live in and 2.5 million people do it everyday. Find out what your state requirements are and know that your kid can fulfill them with one hand tied behind his or her back.  Of course your child is not going to be doing exactly the same curriculum as their classmates but then why would you be doing this if you didn’t want something different? 

Now, we were only gone for a year.  If you are considering a full time travel lifestyle then obviously you will have to consider other options like “unschooling”, online curriculums or stints in local schools. But for one year?  Don’t sweat it. What they were seeing and experiencing each day was worth its weight in theoretical academics.

Instead of working on computers we decided to bring along actual grammar and math workbooks.  This worked because my oldest daughter went back and forth to the states and so could schlep books as required.  It was nice to have something tangible to give the kids wherein they could see their progress but I can imagine an online course working as well - so long as you have access to internet or can download it when you do.


The best thing we did was insist the kids keep a blog. They could write about whatever they wanted to, completely uncensored, but they did have to write.  By the end of the year all three had not only become fluent in typing, uploading, photo editing and sharing, they were much better writers and could churn out copy on demand. I highly recommend this.  


The one thing that surprised me was having to schedule reading.  Since my oldest two are voracious readers I had expected this to be a no brainer, loading our kindles with novels relating to the countries we were visiting.  But the youngest ones preferred to watch episodes of Glee and Friends on their Itouches, who would have thunk it?  Finally I had to tell them their school had told me reading 25 books was a requirement for entering 4th grade.  (Ok, not a requirement but a suggestion, never underestimate the value of lying to your children).  They got it done.  In all honesty, I didn’t get as much fiction reading done as I had expected either, what with the need to be constantly reading guidebooks and planning our next steps via the internet.


Whatever approach you take, just make sure it doesn’t interfere with your overall enjoyment of the trip.  After all, you didn’t decide to spend your money and interrupt your career to nag junior to write an essay. Later when their 10th grade teacher brings up the Vietnam war they can remember handling unexploded ordinance dug out of farmers’ field in Laos or how it felt to float up through the jungle on the winding Mekong river.  The maxim is, keep up with the math and everything else is enrichment.  


Since we were moving from New York to Pennsylvania we had to follow PA’s homeschooling criteria. It turns out that New York is more stringent than PA, requiring quarterly updates from parents to the school district supervisor so this turned out to be an unexpected perk.  PA only required us to draw up and register a study plan at the beginning of the school year and then in June send in a portfolio of work showing that we completed it. For our portfolio we copied some pages from their math, grammar and map reading books, a list of books read, some samples of their writing and it worked out fine.  But what did they really do?


Road School Curriculum

Find a 3 million year old fossil, walk in TRex tracks

Taste insects, shoot blowdarts, cut down sugarcane with a machete

Forage in the jungle for wild pepper, cardamon and tea

Learn to knit and weave cloth on a loom

Make silver jewelry, dye batik, carve wooden geckos and make flowers out of watermelon

Wash clothes in a river, shower in a waterfall

Cook dinner in 10 world cuisines

Leap off a cliff on a Tarzan swing

Pray in a mosque, wat, temple and church

Balance eggs on a nail at the equator

Crawl through mine shafts

Scramble across church roofs

Tube down an ice mountain

Zorb in a department store basement

Play touch football on sand dunes in the desert

Zipline across a rain forest

Catch a fish with an empty water bottle and twine

Learn to scuba dive

Float between clouds of fireflies

Sleep in storage sheds, farmhouse barns, boats, trains, and under the desert stars

Hold sticks of dynamite, newborn turtles hatching from their eggs and real dinosaur bones

Meet a re-incarnated Llama

See the sun rise over the Golden Rock

See the sun set over Angkor Wat