Last night I was reading an article about a South African photographer, Ian van Straaten. He lives here in the Karoo and he has made it his mission to show the world the Milky Way. According to this interview about 80% of the world population will never see the Milky Way in their life, due to light pollution from cities. Ian has made it his mission to show the world the Milky Way and he gets up every night, drives around the Karoo and takes pictures of the sky filled with stars.
As I looked outside from our patio, I could see a pitch dark sky with millions of stars and indeed I could see the Milky Way. I remembered, this was one of the things I love about South Africa. After a long warm and sunny day the sky turns red, orange and pink at sunset and is then followed by the most beautiful night sky filled with stars all-over.
Yes we
have left the ocean and are now in the the little Karoo, a semi-arid mountainous area. We have found a lovely cottage at a small farm in Montagu. We stay here with cats, dogs, horses and chickens and from our patio we have a great view over a fruit-tree orchard and the Swartberg mountains. We have planned a slightly longer stay here, so we will be here for the next two weeks, celebrating Christmas and New Year. We have already been invited to the Midnight in Montagu party that will be held at our neighbors on the 31st.
So how have we been doing so far. After we left Cape Town we spent three nights at Grootbos, a very special 
and luxurious place. Here we were treated with very fine dining and wine and lots of activities. The kids did pony rides, Petra went horse riding thru the Fijnbos, we did a 4×4 safari tour to look for (and find) the magnificent Protea flowers, we visited ancient caves at the beach and lots more. We all had a great time here, but since we tried to cramp in as much as possible activities as we could in three days, we needed a bit of rest thereafter.
That’s ex
actly what we had planned for and we had booked a Cape cod style beach house near Gansbaai for the next 5 days. Gansbaai is famous for two things, whale watching and white shark diving. But the whales already left this area and diving with sharks is not the most suitable activity for young kids, so we mainly spent our time on the beach and in our house. This gave us time to start the ‘normal’ things in our new life. Time to do the laundry, stock-up on groceries, time for the kids to play with their lego or little ponies and time to start home schooling Lucas.
One of the things we want to find out this year is the best way to educate our kids. We are not convinced yet that the Dutch educational system is the best system to set-up our kids to thrive in a fast changing global world. From fellow traveling families we have learned that there are many other ways to educate your kids, sometimes labelled as home schooling, world schooling or even un-schooling. We already discovered that we can teach the kids lots of things just by traveling. Biology lessons at the aquarium, English language lessons when we meet new people, cultural lessons when we drive past townships, and so on and so on. But even though Lucas is formally not yet obliged to have formal schooling (in the Netherl
ands formal schooling is a must at the age of 5), we wanted to try home schooling as well and we have signed him up at the World School in Lelystad. The World School teaches virtual all of the Dutch school curriculum from age of 4 till age 18. We have a teaching guide, some books and cd’s and lots of fun stuff and Lucas really loves going to ‘World School’. About two or three times a week we block 1-2 hrs and teach him new stuff. Although teaching is maybe no the right word, as most of the activities are more playing than teaching.
We also try to get back into a daily routine. Trying to get the kids back to bed early in the evening (at Grootbos we had late dinners, so the kids went to bed most nights around 10 pm) and making time for a mid-day nap. The sun rises very early here, around 5:30 am and usually the kids are awake around 6 am. We skipped the mid-day nap a few days, but we noticed the kids (and we) got easily cranky and irritated, so we decided to give them more rest. So typically we have an hour of playing time in the morning, then have breakfast outside on our patio and then do a morning activity. We go visit an
interesting place, do homeschooling or go shopping. Then after lunch we have some quiet time, do a nap, read or listen to a book or work on the blog. Late afternoon we try to be active and go swimming or in Franskraal we went to the beach. Most nights we cook our own dinner and eat it outside on our patio, then we write our diaries, read a bed time story and try to have the kids in bed before 8 pm. This gives us a few hours to catch-up on our emails or read a book and we are all asleep by 10:30 pm.
As Petra her coach Tara is saying, this is our ‘new normal’ and we are slowly getting used that this is true. This is our life for the next 10 months and it is normal for us to live this way.
That’s all for today – more stories next time.