The day of our departure...

is tomorrow. Sorry to be so quiet this week, but it's been quite busy as you can well imagine. Packing. Unpacking. Repacking. We travel only with carry-on bags, so we've gotta keep things to a bare minimum. The children are finally in bed. I'm going to be up for a while still. Tomorrow we leave here around noon and fly to Miami. Then at 6 in the evening, we take off for Madrid. After months of planning, the day of our departure is upon us.

Fortunately, I will have access to a computer in the apartment where we will be staying, so I hope to post blogs on a regular basis. More regularly than I have in the past two or three weeks. At least, that's the plan. Actually, let me revise that. We will arrive on Friday. We will then leave Madrid for five days from Sunday until Thursday. After that, I should be able to regulate my posting a little more.

Please bear with me. Please feel free to write to me at gailnhb@yahoo.com. Please ask questions. I will try to answer them. Please give sage and timely advice on travel with children. Tell me of your favorite haunts in Madrid, little towns you loved in Spain, shops you returned to again and again. In return, I will describe our apartment, our neighborhood, our new food selections - all that kind of stuff. What an adventure this promises to be for all of us!

I am so looking forward to this trip. So much to see, taste, learn, and experience with the children. I am going to try not to teach them a whole lot; my goal is to let them learn a lot on their own. If they have questions, I will do my best to answer. Otherwise, I want to keep as quiet as possible and watch them figure a lot out on their own. This is going to be tough for me. I'm a talker. I'm a teacher. I want to tell all that I know - hence, the blog. So I'm using this trip as a test of my ability to take off the teaching uniform and just be a Mom. Be a loving and generous travel companion for my two youngest and most dear friends on this Iberian journey. Be a fellow explorer. Be a listener. I hope and pray that I will be able to bring those newly learning skills back home.

Well, I'm off to clean the toilets one last time, find our money belts, straighten up and clean off the homeschool table (our school year is officially over!), and do some serious journaling before bedtime. So much to write. So much to wonder about. So many questions to pose - then upon my return I will see how many of them have been answered. Perhaps I will return with only more questions - and no answers at all. If that happens, the trip will have been a success. Living the questions... That's the true story of my life.

On the road again, Gail