Friday, July 02, 2010

Koblenz trip: the basic explanation

So I'm posting a bunch of photos from my recent trip, a two-week trip with my ten year old daughter Chloe to Koblenz, Germany. The trip is organized by Summit Elementary School in Austin and the Schenkendorf School in Koblenz, and has been going on for 17 years now.

Koblenz is notable, among other things, for being situated at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle rivers. It's densely provided with things to see, having hundreds of years of history and the castles to prove it.

The trip is an exchange program, and this year it was Summit's turn to go to Gerrmany, so our group of 37 Austinites went there and lived with host families for the duration. Most of the travellers were groups like mine: a parent and child. A few took two kids and both parents, and these were typically split, living in two different host family homes.

We were lucky enough to be visiting a family we already knew: the Knopp family had visited us last year.

I'm told that the organizers changed the schedule this year to provide more time with the host families. You should know that the organizers plan a trip of some kind every weekday of the tour. So we gather each morning at the school and get on a bus, typically, to go to some new sight. But we were generally done by 3 or 4pm, returning to our host families...who often then had something else planned for us to do. We didn't get a lot of sleep.

Pro tip: this trip is mostly about foot management. You do a ton of walking. The kids hardly seem to notice it, but maybe that's because they're putting less weight on their tootsies.



Chloe stands below a globe hanging in the halls of the Schenkendorf School. I love this thing. I want to make my own.

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