Roamers Report #9 November 11, 2024

Dear Fellow Travel Enthusiasts,

Welcome to the 9th installment of the Roamers' Report!

General Update:

We continued our travels through mysterious Morocco, heading south to Ouarzazate and Merzouga to spend some time in the Sahara Desert where we celebrated Finley's 8th birthday.  This was definitely a highlight of the trip for the kids as well as for Francesca and me.  The landscape was incredbible!  We then spent a few days in the High Atlas mountains before closing out our Moroccan adventure with five days in Marrakesh. 

As most of you know, our family loves Halloween, having hosted an annual Halloween bash - complete with themed box maze and food - for the past 10 years and we enjoy putting our family costumes together.  Francesca and the kids knew how bummed I was to not be home on October 31st this year and, to make matters worse, we would be in a country that did not celebrate Halloween at all. So they decided to suprise me and cut our Moroccan adventure a little short and fly us to Translyvania to spend Halloween at a party in Dracula's castle!!  If I was not going to be at home, Transylvania is the place I'd definitely want to be to celebrate Halloween.  If interested please read our blog posts about our search for Dracula in Romania and our posts about the three Translyvanian cities we visited, Sibiu, Sighisoara and Bran.  

We were also inspired by the masquerade masks we saw in Venice, Italy and made our own Halloween masks out of papier mache.  You can see some of the pics down below and more on our post "How to Make a Papier Mache Masquerade Mask".

After all the Halloween fun we boarded a plane - actually several planes - and headed to our next destination, Thailand. The cheapest flights Francesca could find for us took us from Bucharest, Romania to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to Guangdong, China and then finally into Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. Four countries is a little over 24 hours!

As I sit typing this newsletter, this is the view that I am looking out at from our place for the next two weeks. 

Where We've Been & Where We Are:

(An overview of the countries and cities we've been since the last newsletter and an update on where we are currently)

Here are some pics from Ouarzazate, Merzouga and the High Atlas, but please visit our blog posts from those cities for more. 

Here are some pictures of our short visit to Transylvania (Romania) on our quest to find Dracula and his Halloween Party. For more pics please visit our blog posts Halloween in Dracula's Castle! as well as our posts about the three Romanian cities we visited, Sibiu, Sighisoara and Bran.  And if you are curious about the real Dracula - Vlad III (aka "Vlad the Impaler") check out the report Ryan did on him for school in our post called "Searching for Dracula".

We also made a short video about the making of our Halloween masks.  Take a look!

A few pics from our first few days in Pai, Thailand.

Travel Stories:

(Hopefully humorous stories about real events that happened to us on our trip)

THE BAD SHEPHERDS

The three hellhounds corralled the baby sheep away from the herd, hunting him down like a pride of lions taking down a wildebeest on the Serengeti. As I gave chase—yelling commands they couldn’t understand—they wrestled the poor lamb to the ground. Teeth gnashing, they set upon the little guy with all the zest of wolves gone rogue. I was sure he was a goner, and for a moment, I worried what might happen to me if I tried to intercede. But in I went… Click here to read more!

In case you missed the previous Travel Stories, here they are.....

Hamam-a-jama! October 22, 2024 

Trapped: Parking Garage Escape Room! September 2024 

To the Bat Cave Ryan (Vyrises, Greece) August 2024

Gentlemen Start Your Bouzoukis (Anatoli, Greece) August 2024

Between Some Rocks and a Hot Place (Myrtos, Greece) July 2024

The Myth of Traveling Kindness (Crete, Greece) July 2024

The Sugar Spoon Caper (Chania, Greece) June 2024

Homeschool Update:

(Many of you may not care about the home schooling portion of this, but since it's ostensibly the reason we are doing this, I will provide a brief update during these Newsletters.)

The kids are now fully functional with their new online platform Khan Academy and, as can be expected, some of them like it, some of them don't.  But we remind them that they would not be able to pick their teacher at school so in the same vein they cannot always pick their preferred online learning platform.  And we remind them of our travel motto: "Roll with it!" :) As parents/teachers we like Khan as it gives good video instruction.  The interface is a little clunky and confusing, but some of that may be user (parent) error.  I'm sure we'll work out more kinks as we move forward.

But more than the online academic portion of their schooling, Francesca is helping me to become more relaxed on the book study part and embrace the world schooling portion. It's taken me some time to back off of that to a degree, but also to appreciate that the kids learn differently than I do.  Initially I was anxious for them to absorb all of the culture that they were drinking in from a firehose and got frustrated when they didn't or didn't seem to care. But now, I delight in the moments where I can see the learning happening on their terms and at their pace.

For example, sitting in the hot spring, they noted that the water was turning from a liquid to a gas (in the form of steam) while at the same time it was turning from a gas into a liquid (falling rain).  And when they observed a banana tree on our walk and noticed that they were the same leaves that the bowls were made out of at the restaurant we ate at the day before.  Then they took some of those leaves off of a branch that had fallen down and tried their hands at making their own bowls.

And of course, it is music to our ears to hear the kids recall something from (or make a comparision to) one of the previous countries we've visited.  "Hey, this is kind of like how they did it in Spain, but with this difference!"

Blog Posts:

(Blog Posts Published since the last newsletter - in case you missed them on social media)

Romania: Halloween in Dracula's Castle! 

Romania: Sensational Sighisoara! 

Romania: Satisfying Sibiu 

Romania: Searching for Dracula! 

Morocco: Magnificent Marrakesh 

High Up in the High Atlas 

Morocco: Mezmerizing Merzouga! 

Morocco: Outstanding Ouarzazate! 

Truth Serum:

(A dose of truth about some of the things that did not go according to plan or worries that we've had about the trip)

I would have thought that it would have been in Latin America where I would become adicted to coke, but Francesca and I have become severely adicted to the stuff starting pretty much in Greece and continuing on through Bosnia, Slovenia and Spain. By the time we got to Morocco and were going through 3 or 4 two-liter bottles per week, sometimes starting as early as 8am (wake and bake baby!) we knew we had a problem. 

We think we know the reason for our addiction.  Back home we were coke-totalers, drinking one or two glasses on a weekend, but not usually during the week.  It was a conscious effort to not drink so much of the stuff as it's just not healthy in any way shape or form.  We substituted naturally flavored seltzer water to give us that refreshing effervescence that we craved from soda.  However, what we found in Europe and Morocco is that there is not a wide selection of flavored seltzer and stores typically have Perrier or other similar drink which Francesca and I find to have an unpleasant aftertaste.  We tried to throw those down, but they were just not doing it for us. 

So we started buying and consuming Coke Zero, cautiously at first, and then, with increasingly reckless abandon. The problem was exacerbated by the extreme heat in Greece, Bosnia and Slovenia where we wanted, nay, NEEDED, a cold beverage to cool us off.  So by the time we got to the cooler temperatures of Spain it was a full blown addiction with no attempts to self regulate. 

Francesca was the first one to recognize that she had a problem and one day in Marrakesh decided to go cold turkey.  I held out longer, saying to my family that I could quit any time.  But by the time we got to Romania I knew I had to turn my life around. I decided then and there that I would go cold turkey once we touched ground in Thailand.  It seemed like a fitting place to try and get more healthy and so I pledge to work out more as well once in Thailand.

We have been in Thailand now for 6 days and I am happy to say I am 6 days clean and coke-free.  The kids - being the little shits that they are - drag me by the hand to the convenience store or restaurant coolers to show me the glistening cans of Coke Zero, but I am strong in my resolve to rid myself of these toxins.  We still have not found a suitable alternative to our LeCroix selzers, but there is a Singha Soda Water that is plain, but at least has no aftertaste.  And I am trying to enjoy the taste of cold flat water as well.  We'll see if I can stay on the wagon as we travel further..... or is it off the wagon? 

Trip Stats:

(I'm a little reluctant about this section because this trip is supposed to be more about quality and experience than sheer quantity, but I find stats like this interesting nonetheless) 

I am getting a bit more comfortable with keeping the trip stats.  As time goes by and the stats grow, it is getting fun to track the various cities we've been to and the modes of transport we've taken, etc. 

Here is a quick list of countries we've been to so far on this trip. They are places we have stayed overnight for at least one night. The bold ones are places we've lived in for an extended period of time (over 3 weeks). 

• United States

• United Kingdom

• Greece

• Croatia

• Bosnia and Hercegovina

• Slovenia

• Austria

• Italy

• Spain

• Portugal

• Morocco

• Romania

• Thailand

Here is the link to the full trip stats page.

Thanks for joining us on our journey. I have tried to keep to my self imposed routine of sending a Roamers' Report every 2 weeks, but it hasn't always worked out that way. But I do post more regularly on social media (mostly FB, but some Instagram too) so if you want more real time updates please follow our Five Tickets to Roam FB page .

Regards,

The Roamers - Dan, Francesca, Ryan, Austen & Finley