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Showing posts from July, 2012

A Week at Lago del Bosco

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Less than a week ago I dropped my daughter, Rose, off at Lago del Bosco, an Italian immersion camp offered through Concordia Language Villages . Rose has been wanting to go to Italian camp for well over a year. She wanted to go so badly that she saved $400 over the last year to help defray the cost. But as we got closer and closer to the time for her to leave for camp Rose got more and more nervous about what her experience would be like, worried that she wouldn't make any friends. And, as a mother who has never sent a daughter off to camp all by herself before, I got more nervous and worried, too. Despite our nerves and worries we drove Rose up to camp last Monday. Everyone was friendly - and everyone was speaking Italian! (language immersion is part of the camp experience). It was a bit overwhelming for all of us yet the counselors are great at sign language and we managed to figure out where to go and what to do. Rose had to check in, go through "customs", pick an

Ten in a Row!

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Ever since we bought our Piper Pacer, a classic tube and fabric four-passenger airplane, our family has loaded it up each summer and flown off to the annual Short Wing Piper Club convention. This airplane type-club convention has taken us all over the country - as far west as Vancouver, WA, as far east as Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and many points in between. We’ve attended every convention since 2003 - this year marks our tenth in a row! When we tell people we have a plane and fly it across the country they usually think we fly fast and get places quickly. They also often have this idea that our plane is big and expensive. In reality my Pacer is about the size of a VW Bug and a person can buy one for far less than they would spend on a full-sized SUV (I call our plane our SUV - ShortWing Utility Vehicle). And though we do average around 124 miles per hour we only fly about four to five hours per day so getting places still takes a long time. It's kind of squishy in the