Atypical family vacation fodder for latest book
With three kids in tow, Tsh Oxenreider and her husband, Kyle, set out on a global adventure — a year of traveling the world, from China and Thailand to Australia and New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Morocco, France and Croatia.
The world became the classroom for the 2014-2015 school year for 9-year-old Tate, 6-yearold Reed and 4-year-old Finn. “There’s no comparison to being somewhere,” she says. “They can read about the history of the Great Wall and what it’s like, but they don’t know what it smells like or feels like.” She compares their journey to one giant field trip. “We remember the field trips,” she says about her time in school. “We learned so much more in field trips than we did in the classroom. It’s the same idea.”
Cafes and kitchen tables became Kyle and Tsh Oxenreider’s offices.
Now the Austin, Texas mom has written about their adventures in “At Home in the World: Recollections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe.”
When they first set out, they had to figure out how to make everything they needed fit into the backpacks and how to dress for different climates and very different cultures. It meant that each kid could only choose one important thing to bring with them, not a whole backpack of stuffed animals.
They would bring journals and Kindles loaded up with schoolwork as well as laptops for the grownup work.
They had a long history of living in other parts of the world. Kyle and Tsh had lived in Turkey when the kids were younger, but they had never been on the move for a whole year. They had never packed up everything they owned, put it in storage, sold their house and been without a permanent address.
Instead of starting in Europe, they started at the other end of the world, in China. “In some ways, we were ripping the BandAid off,” she says.
The jet lag and adjusting to the different sights and sounds was rough, as well as being surrounded by the communist mindset and the air pollution. They settled in a small guest house in Beijing and begin to acclimate to sharing tight quarters. They gave themselves time to adjust, see the Great Wall, navigate trans- portation and order food before moving on.
The Oxenreiders planned this trip with short bursts of covering a lot of territory, then longer times when they went “low and slow,” as Tsh Oxenreider calls it. Thailand was one of the places
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