Overland with Kids

A note from Jess….

“Dear folks,

We’re having a great time on our travels I {Jessica} even spelt the word schmaltzily…know what it means? No? It means something like swagger but I don’t know we’ll have to look in a dictionary. Be sure to look on are website and track us wherever we are in the world. Anyway I’ll hand you over to AJ now.”

A note from AJ…..

“We have some toy’s with us in our Land-Rover and caravan!!!!!!! We have been to Amsterdam in the Netherlands and we are now in Germany. I’ll hand you over to Jess now”.

From Jess…..

“We went to see Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and we saw how her life was. We saw her diary itself but it was in a glass case. We saw her room, the attic, the warehouse.  Did you know they had a secret door to get to there secret part of the house? - It is a book-case that opened up to get to the door!!!!!and it is still there as it was originally.”

Lots of love,
Jess and AJ
XXXX

From Andrew and Anne…………

Locations

Our trip so far has taken us to see Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam (now a museum and a highly recommended visit especially with children though AJ at 5 years old is a little young and got a little bit bored so it was difficult to keep him occupied at times). The visit left a huge impression with Jessica and was overall an excellent introductory for her age group about the war and it’s atrocities. She was so impressed, saddened and hungry for more information all at the same time that we bought her an 8 year+ version of Anne’s autobiography which she has been busy reading exerts from since.

We are now in St Goar - a small village on the banks of the river Rhine. As we write, we are staring at the river and it’s busy activities of barges and tour boats sailing up and down approx. 2 metres away from us. It’s a beautiful area from the Koblenz to Mainz routes as there are Castles dotted high up along the banks in whichever direction you happen to look. Both the vehicle and the caravan are fine - we are too!! with no issues to report. The caravan in fact is invaluable to us as it is very easy to pitch now, comfortable and easy for the children and us to relax. We are trying to take our time as much as possible drive wise, wind down and enjoy what‘s around us before moving on.

Weather has been a mixture of very cold and wet though we’ve had a couple of glorious warm t-shirt days since heading further South. Today has reverted to cold and miserable again but the caravan is insulated even though we have no heating at night! We did bring hot water bottles but so far haven’t used in favour of layering clothes and blankets. 

Accommodation

We have  been staying at campsite locations as easier for the children and this has so far proved to be a good move. We’ve had a mix of sleeping 1 night rough at ferry port in the UK, 1 homestay and 6 nights including tonight’s stay at 3 different campsite locations between the Netherlands and Germany. One of the campsites consisted of just a field for the night - more ‘basic’ camping but it was only for 1 night and it didn’t deter the kids from running riot around the place and climbing the trees in the nearby woods.

Costs

Excluding visa and ferry costs, we have spent a total 677.54 Euros so far and driven 613 miles. The main bulk being made up of fuel (35%), food (27%) and campsite accommodation (25%). We’ve overspent on food due to treating ourselves to breakfast, dinner, drinks and crisps on the ferry as part of our last treats. And we are treating ourselves to electricity hook up at each campsite currently though we should start getting used to becoming more self-sufficient shortly.

Food

We brought enough food from the UK to last us a good while especially as we were hitting the Easter weekend. Free little chocolate eggs were given out to us on the Metro in Amsterdam on Easter Monday and you could help yourself to them on the trams also - delicious! We vote that these should be available on all public transport in the UK.

Apart from the ferry, we’ve made our own breakfast and dinner throughout. For the children it’s cereal every morning (Weetabix) and for us it’s been eggs - fresh from a hen on one occassion plus fresh local bread or fried bacon etc. For dinner we’ve had mince and pasta based dishes, noodles, plus scrummy jacket potatoes and barbeque sausages or pork chops from the Cobb.

We treated ourselves today to German beer, apple juice, hot dogs and ice cream from a local street cafe followed by fresh cakes and bread bought next door from the local bakers. As it’s so cold this evening, we spotted a local takeaway for burgers, chips and sausages but unfortunately is was shut when we got there so it was yoghurts and boiled frankfurters for tea tonight.

Education

This has been a major focus for us at present in order to get into good habits quickly and we have brought everything with us from Science, Geography, Space, English, Maths, Reading, Spellings, Art and lots more including plenty of games - we have a real mobile school going. We stripped out our caravan of it’s fridge, sink and cooker unit plus gas bottles before leaving the UK. The space now houses enough ’stuff’ for the children for one year.

So far, among several topics, the children have covered spelling at least twice in the past few days (including more challenging words for Jessica as they are introduced like ‘schmaltzily‘ and ‘Netherlands‘), journal/diary writing, reading, maths, map reading, simple compass reading and geography. Jessica also did a special write up about Anne Frank and AJ has made up a story about monsters. All have doubled up as good sources of literacy and hand-writing practice and both Jess and AJ have their own special exercise and art books along with diaries etc. each to keep.  We are keeping a detailed journal of what they are doing but to give an example of what we covered yesterday - it was largely spelling tests while driving, reading Anne Frank (Jess) and sticker fun and soldiers (AJ). Today - Jessica spent some time updating her journal/diary while AJ did 4 pages of 16 sums per page of adding and subtracting though he had to be hoodwinked with a small reward every so often until he completed. Reward stickers for AJ are also de-rigeur - thank God we brought plenty! AJ’s concentration span is not as mature as Jessica’s as she is the older. And, we have quickly learned that we must sit 1-2-1 with AJ rather than trying subjects like written maths while on the move. We have also started  to separate them both each day - works much better i.e. one goes for a walk with dad and is provided verbal learning while the other sits with mum and works. We then swap the children. Todays learning included reading practice for AJ.

Times tables feature daily, mainly in the car and both Jess and AJ have their own special maths cubes each to help them learn.

Diary (Blog)

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