"You're going to Guatemala?"

"Guatemala? Why are you going to Guatemala?"

That is a really good question.  My almost 8-year old has asked that multiple times.  I think she's hoping that if I explain it to her one more time, it will actually make sense to her why we are taking her away from her best friends and her house and everything she knows.  

She has also  had a hard time explaining to her teachers that we aren't going on a mission trip.  Isn't that what people do in a country like Guatemala? Honestly, a mission trip would have been easier to explain and way more noble. But this trip really isn't about that.  

I think the best way to describe it would be a  2 1/2-month "family study abroad." 

About a year ago, we started cooking up plans to get a few months of time cleared where Ryan wouldn't have any teaching going on.  For a lot of professors, that would be summer, but Ryan teaches in the summer.  So the best option was the fall,  even though that would mean pulling the kids out of school.   And homeschooling.  For some people that would be the highlight of the adventure, but I am exceptionally supportive of public education and am generally content to defer the majority of that work to professionals. But in the pursuit of adventure, sacrifices have to be made.

We started looking for a place to go, initially focusing on finding somewhere Ryan could do a visiting position at a university like he did a few years ago when we went to Switzerland.  We chose a few countries that we thought would be good and went to work on seeing which would be best.  

We didn't get very far. For one reason or another, nothing would fall into place.  No doors opened, and no pathways revealed themselves.  

Our primary goal was to find a place where our kids could become as immersed as possible in a culture and community that wasn't their own.  I cared a lot about the weather, since the idea of being caged up in a little apartment, homeschooling in a foreign country where it's too cold or rainy to go outside, was not at all what I was hoping for.  It needed to be affordable, because when the cost of each activity is multiplied by 6, it can add up way too quickly. Also, we knew we wanted to pick one place that we would stay in for the entire time, with only short day trips or the occasional overnighter.  

In contrast to the idea of staying put, we moved about constantly when we did our trip to Europe four years ago, putting over 7500 miles on our van over the course of the two months.  It was amazing. And exhausting. And Ryan made it really clear that if we ever travelled again with our kids it would NOT be like that.

In the course of trying to decide where to go, we had a conversation with some friends from church.  The husband is from Guatemala and the wife is from the U.S.  They had taken their kids to Guatemala for a month and had great things to say about it.  And with that, the fire was lit.

Almost twenty years ago, just a few months after finishing my mission to Chile, I traveled to Guatemala with the BYU nursing program.  I lived in the city of Antigua for 6 weeks, and I fell in love with it.  We worked in clinics and the hospital during the week and then went on amazing adventures during the weekend.  Every day we would go to "Spanish school" for 2 hours, where we would basically get one-on-one tutoring from a local teacher.

When I thought through what it would be like to go as a family there, it all started to come together. I began looking at housing options, and imagined what it would be like to live there.  The weather? Highs are in the 70's, lows are in the 50's.  All year long. They call it the "land of eternal spring."  It's safe, inexpensive, and oozes historical charm.  It's surrounded by mostly-dormant volcanoes. The city is small enough that we can walk anywhere we need to go.  For longer distances, hiring people to drive you is very affordable.  There is a good sized church community to be part of,  and the chapel is just a few blocks from the house we eventually decided to rent. There are great opportunities to do service and to participate in the community. And every day, my kids can go to Spanish school and meet one-on-one with a teacher like I did twenty years ago.  Just like that, the search was over.

We found a house to rent and cashed out frequent flyer miles to book the plane tickets. Then, after those parts were decided, I stopped making plans.  I've done plenty of research to make sure we are  as prepared for the trip as we can be, but not much more beyond that.   It is all just an adventure waiting to be created and lived.  There are definitely benefits the the well-scheduled trip, but I am embracing the unknown of this one.

I was listening to Pride and Prejudice as I was packing for this trip.  There's a part where Elizabeth is talking to her aunt about the prospect of traveling together in the upcoming summer.  She says:

"And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of any thing. We will know where we have gone -- we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travelers."

I blogged on our last trip and made a photo book out of it using all of the blog entries.  Without that, I'm afraid the lakes, mountains, and rivers would most definitely have become jumbled together. So in an attempt to ensure that we know with a certainty "where we have gone", I'll be posting here pretty regularly and sharing the ups and downs of  what we encounter as we live for the next two and a half months in Antigua.