After we left Greenland, we had a mixture of at-sea days and port days. We had two days in Atlantic Canada: St. John’s, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Between these two ports, we made our way briefly back to France when we visited St. Pierre. It felt surreal to step [...]
Read MoreAfter our early departure from Iceland, we spent a day sailing straight for the fjords of Greenland. We took shelter in the calm waters of the fjords for two days instead of doing the two extra days in Iceland. We saw tons of icebergs, glaciers, mountains, and waterfalls as we [...]
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Hello, we’re Micheka and Jon and we live in London, Ontario where we are pursuing our respective careers in the fields of forensic engineering and transportation engineering.
Since 2009, we’ve travelled to Europe seven times – for backpacking, for lounging, to get married / honeymoon, to cruise, and to have family time! In 2023-2024, we return for our family sabbatical year!
Follow along as we continue our journey!
Read MoreWe made it back to York, England on the evening of September 8. We got off the train and walked to our AirBnB accommodations, dropped everything off, and headed straight out to grab dinner at our favourite low-key pub, Lendel Cellars. As soon as we got to York, it felt to both Jon and me that we were coming back […]
We have found Edinburgh to be an extremely expensive city to visit, especially as we stayed in a hotel here and therefore needed to eat out a lot more since we have no kitchen of our own to cook. That said, we found tons of amazing things to do around town that were free or close to it. Portobello Beach […]
During our first trip to Edinburgh in 2011, we stopped at Stirling during an excursion we did. In fact, we did many excursions on that trip. We were excited to do at least one excursion with the girls, to show them other areas of Scotland. We started to second-guess that when we started looking at prices for the excursions. They […]
We arrived in Edinburgh on August 31 after a long, 17-hour travel day from Spain, via a stopover in Stockholm. While walking and wandering around the streets, I was stopping at pretty much every restaurant to check menus and prices, looking for places that seemed good but also wouldn’t break the bank! I stopped at one, which happened to be […]
Our time in Oria and in Spain (for now) has come to an end. Compared to Portugal, the Spanish lifestyle was definitely more challenging to adapt to. Our hosts concurred and did mention that it took them a good year when they moved to Spain from the UK to adjust to that lifestyle. For example, almost every store in town […]
In Oria, we are mainly in a small town and rural area. One of the main features of living in such a place is the cats and dogs everywhere! Here at Shepherd’s Rest, they alone have three cats – Patsy, Livvy, and Evie – as well as four dogs – Taffy, Saffron, Lucky, and Ivy. The girls are completely obsessed […]
We love learning about the history of the places we visit. And we were incredibly intrigued when we learned that the earliest evidence of human life was found less than an hour away from here, in Orce. Some friends we met here earlier in August went there and we decided we would love to go there ourselves. We drove out […]
In summer 2022 we read the entire series of Harry Potter as a family and watched each movie as we finished the corresponding book. The girls LOVED this series, and I’m pretty sure it’s still their favourite book series to date. A particular favourite of Katia’s was Hedwig. She has since gotten a stuffed Hedwig and lots of other owl […]
The Spanish lifestyle (combined with the Spanish heat and lack of AC) has been a real struggle for Jon and me to adjust to. We are trying our best because it is important to us to live authentically in each place we visit and live temporarily. But it’s been hard here! Everything is closed from 2 p.m. until around 6 […]
This is a term we had never heard until January 2023 when another mom at the girls’ school told us what we were planning to do sounded like worldschooling. She told me to check out the Facebook group. Not being much of a Facebook user, it took me a couple of weeks to do so, but the information in that […]