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As they describe themselves on their website, soultravelers3 is a family of two parents and 6-year-old daughter from Santa Cruz, California, who embarked on "an epic odyssey: open-ended, years long slow trip around the world as a family adventure, unschool, spiritual journey and lifestyle" beginning in September, 2006. Frequent commenters on the My Wonderful World blog, I asked soultravelers3 to share details about ways travel contributes to the family's geographic learning. Their response follows.

As we enter our third year of our open ended world tour, I can say that our travel experiences have had an astonishing contribution to our family’s geographic learning! Our main motivation behind this world tour was to educate our child in the best way possible as a global citizen of the 21st century, and the benefits from our travel have just been stunning and way beyond our very high expectations.

We have the luxury to travel very slowly which allows us to immerse deeply into the places and cultures where we stay. This will be our third year wintering in a tiny 15th century white village in Andalusia, Spain, where my daughter studies at the local school in her second language and where she takes flamenco lessons from one of the local masters. We love experiencing the many festivals, the food, the customs and traditions. It has a rich history during both the 800 years in which Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in peace and also during the horrific reconquest. We live in a farming community so we watch them grow food, listen to the goats and roosters and listen to the beautiful Andalusian horses and donkeys clomp by on the cobble streets. We have grown very fond of our village and its warm people. It will always hold a special place in our hearts. 

We travel for 7 months following the weather and have used every mode of transportation from camels to trolley cars, although our main transportation is a small RV which we park for long periods and walk or use mass transit. We have been to 4 continents, 28 countries and traveled over 60,000 miles, mostly by land or water. Seeing so much of this wonderful earth we live on, how can we not be thoroughly affected? We are constantly learning and we always seem to meet fantastic people who are willing to share their world with us.

A good example of a profound geographical learning for us was our journey into Africa to visit Morocco and the Sahara desert.  We met an open-hearted city girl from Brazil who spoke 6 languages. She came to the Sahara and ended up marrying a Berber Nomad whose family had lived in this mystical place for generations. Our 6-year-old daughter rode in on a camel to those bright orange Merzouga dunes of the Sahara to give a violin concert to 60 Berber kids who lived there, without running water, and who had never seen a violin. They were clapping and singing French songs to her arrival and she was carrying a Santa Claus-sized sack full of healthy snacks we brought to share afterwards. They shared no language in common, but all of them shared the language of music, joyfulness and goodwill.

Watch a video of Mozart playing her violin for Berber children in Morroco.

They happily played in the Oasis afterwards and we as a family took our own camel ride deep into the Sahara, where we slept over night in a Berber nomad tent. We ate the delicious local food, learned about the customs, and absorbed the generosity of the people. Later, we visited their home made of mud, and we were invited to watch how they bake their bread in a traditional community oven. If you ask my child about the geographical terms oasis or desert, she has a very deep experience of what this means in the Sahara, the world's largest desert! 

This type of theme of knowing a place and a people deeply has been repeated over and over in our travels and has enriched us all immensely. How could it not?

One of the ways we like to celebrate our wonderful world and the gift of this world tour that we have given to ourselves (through lots of hard work, sacrifice and planning) is to find ways to give back. We are proud to be volunteer travelers for the award winning nonprofit “Reach the World” that matches special travels with disadvantaged school kids. We had an awesome time meeting tons of our great students in person recently in New York City in places like Harlem, the Bronx, Queens and the Lower East Side. It is exciting to know that they are learning about geography right along with us as they travel with us virtually!

 We also volunteer with Teddy Bears Around The World, a project discussed previously on this blog, that involves teaching geography to kids around the world with the use of traveling Teddy Bears. Mozart enjoys taking pictures of her Teddy Bear "Peppa" in various locations as we roam the world and telling other kids what she is seeing and experiencing.

Our travels have allowed us to experience our wonderful world in deeper and more expansive ways. We never tire of learning more about geography through our experiences and love celebrating what is right in our world!

--SoulTravelers3

Read more about the adventures of SoulTravelers3' on their website and blog.

Image of soultravelers3 at an ice bar in Stockholm, Sweden, their own.

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Comments

[Sujan P]

Thanks so much for sharing this kind of topic with us.

World offers various cultures, and this cultures diverse with geographical location. I love to travel and this began my love affair with the many different and beautiful sights, sounds, experiences, cultures and people our world has to offer.

[Boat holiday yorkshire]

Great dear.I enjoyed a lot while reading.I will be back soon to read your upcoming post.Thanks for sharing your experience with us!

[Soultravelers3]

Thanks so much for this! We are really thrilled to be part of My Wonderful World and love what you do.

We also heart National Geographic, so very happy to be part of the celebration of Geography Awareness Week!

We are in Denver at the moment, about to catch a plane to Spain, but were happy to let others on Twitter know about this important event!

So glad to see National Geographic on Twitter and looking forward to seeing My Wonderful World there too!