September 7th marked the first day of Travel-School 2016-2017. We are organized and ready to go ~ as we start this school year off in Newport, RI. After two weeks of ‘homeschool’ at home, we will fly west to see some beautiful parts of our country.  Our schoolbooks are packed, along with abundant, fresh art supplies, paper and all else we need to ‘travel-school’ our way through the wild west!

Our reading room library is ready …

Sophia and Oliver have studied in detail the places we will go, which helps us to set our itinerary. Armed with informative details like climate, population, major industries and even ‘things to do’, we are beginning to piece together how our days will play out in the next six weeks. Sophia included in her research every noteworthy museum in San Francisco, which makes her both an invested traveler and interested student. We will try our best to visit them all. Oliver included sports facilities as well as museums, when researching Lake Tahoe, so we have a lot to see and do there!

Traveling each fall with the kids is bittersweet at the start… we love our home/town/friends and the fall weather in Newport is the stuff of which poetry is written. The temperature, a steady “lovely”; the sunsets, miraculous.  We are lucky to call Newport home each summer, so one can imagine it is hard for us to leave.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who once travelled extensively in the San Francisco area said, “For travel’s sake, the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather-bed of civilization and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints…”

This sentiment resonates with us and we are excited to explore a part of the USA that we have never seen before.

We are two weeks in, and school is going well. Math is off to a strong start, we are engaged in our learning and ready for the travel that lies ahead. (…above, some after-school beach-ing)

Here are some photos from our final days of summer… until spring, dear friends!

S & O taking an after school break to visit Frosty Freeze.

Visiting Abbot’s for end-of-summer fish dinner in Noank, CT… 

Fall Ball with Newport Little League will give way to Fall Ball in Truckee, California for a few weeks in October.

Our summer would not have been complete without visiting Sydney in NYC.