Every couple of weeks, we ask the kids if they’re still enjoying the travel lifestyle or if they’d prefer to be back home. Every time, the answer is they’d prefer to travel! That said, there are still things we’re sacrificing for this lifestyle. We spend time with grandparents, cousins, and friends twice a year, but before long, we’re back on the road.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve connected with several travelers during our journeys, but none of them had children. We have so much in common with these travelers that we’d love for our kids to have similar connections. Imagine how cool it would be to have friends to travel with or meet up with in various countries around the world!
So, we joined a few online worldschool communities in hopes of meeting up, finding hubs or communities, or even signing up for a future worldschooling adventure. No sooner had we posted about some of our adventures in Peru than another family reached out to see if we could get together! I mentioned it to Jenn, and she said, “Sure, that’d be fun!” We set up a time to meet downtown Cusco with plans to visit some nearby ruins.
Now, we’re not always the most timely of people, but this day I was proud of us. We got up and got ready in plenty of time for our day trip to Cusco to meet our new friends. Little did we know that our rental would have a flat tire. Thankfully, we’d dealt with this twice in the Dominican Republic, so we knew the rental car company would just advise us to get the tire fixed.
But we’re worldschoolers, so rather than just fix the tire myself, this became our teachable moment for the day. We got all three kiddos involved so they understood the steps and were hands-on for the whole process. After we got four of the nuts off the tire, we realized our tire iron didn’t fit the fifth bolt!
After a brief moment of panic, I realized this was probably a security mechanism. I turned to the kids and said, “In a rental car, there should be a special nut in the glove compartment that you can use to take this fifth nut off.” We all walked around the car while I silently prayed. Sure enough, there it was! Another good lesson. You can’t plan these things 😅.
Thankfully, our worldschool buddies were more than gracious about the unplanned pitstop, and we were on the road half an hour later! We met up with Sonya, William, and their daughter Sophie at a local restaurant on the edge of the city.
We each had several ancient Inca civilization ruins we were interested in seeing, so we shortlisted the ones we had in common. After a little small talk, a nice meal, and the kids first taste of Kombucha, we hit the road!
As worldschoolers, we’re pretty weird, so it’s not often that you meet up with kindred spirits. You know, when you find you can talk with someone for hours without realizing it! We found that we really enjoy it, and we want that for our kids as well. Needless to say, we very much look forward to connecting more with other worldschooling families in our future travels.
