While planning for our year, both in advance and on-the-go, TripAdvisor became our sixth family member. We poured over reviews and suggestions of restaurants, apartments, hikes, hotels, trains, and self-guided tours. As a school writing assignment, we even studied what makes a good review and...

I had the most beautiful ice cream cone the other day. The rain was just stopping, and the Kyoto street colors were accentuated by the wet. Red lanterns, dark wood, carefully arranged potted plants, flocks of bright umbrellas. As I savored both the green tea color AND flavor, I remembered...

New friends for a new year!  We are so thankful to get to know several sets of amazing people who have shared their meals, their homes, their time, and their STORIES with us over the past month or so during our travels. Click on the “Faces” link to meet some terrific people who...

  With apologies to those YouTube sensation guys who do amazing things with frisbees and basketballs … here is a healthy share of video sandboard dudeness, straight from the sweet sands of the...

Please humor us for a moment — we want to share a goodly amount of photos from a two-and-a-half-day journey in to the heart of Morocco. As Ismail our translator unspooled the country’s people and places, we drank it in — the faces, the language, the smells, the colors, the...

The men in this picture are singing Gnaoua music. Their ancestors were West African slaves, taken from an area once known as Ancient Ghana. They created their music to heal their pain, to exalt the memory of their ancestors — and to simply live in a hard place far home. Here is a song...

Letting it go in Morocco’s Sahara...

Morocco. Morocco. Morocco. This country now has a place — a deep place — in our hearts. We leave in the next few hours (too soon!) after cris-crossing the country, soaking in the people, their languages, and their story. We leave you with a few images from our journey … and...

Sunrise at Merzouga, at the edge of the...

Our first glimpse of the Sahara, Friday afternoon near Merzouga,...

Today, our journey went from this … … to this … … to this: We have come south in Morocco to THE SAHARA where, in a few hours, we will wake up early to see the sun rise over the dunes. It was an epic, nine-hour drive … that refreshed us, oddly, as we barreled...

DESIGN was the first thing that came in to my...

I brought E to this courtyard a few days ago to see its MASSIVE silk tree. We talked about things he can truly RELY on that are SOLID in his life and heart — like that tree! — when life seems complicated or difficult or frustrating or scary, like the seeming craziness of the...

SNOW IN...

Land of the unexpected… This evening in Morocco, the five of us are marvelling at a brilliant red sunset smear while careening down a mountain in a Volkswagen Golf. Along the roadside are dozens of troughs of stacked rocks, filled with the onion harvest and covered with straw and orange...

  These are some pictures I took on a day trip to...

(We’re sharing images of LIGHT from our travels in concert with Scripture for...

  Today, we WALKED the limits of empire. The Roman empire once stretched north nearly to Scotland. We visited the remnants of that northernmost border — Hadrian’s Wall — in  September. The empire’s SOUTHERN border once stretched as far as an outpost called...

Our three young scholars working hard … and their morning World School teacher, selflessly grading AN ALGEBRA...

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