Leaving Toronto was no easy feat! We are renting out our house so that meant the whole house had to be cleared of all personal items and left in tip-top shape. The kids all wrapped up school for the rest of the school year. Nicholas finished exams at the end of January and enjoyed many quiet hours at the computer coding when he wasn’t dragged into house cleaning. (It turns out by the way that he is a very meticulous cleaner – who knew!?) Zachary and Lucas finished school a week later. Zachary, who is in grade 8, was surprised with a graduation ceremony just for him, organized by his wonderful teacher. We are grateful that all three schools were incredibly supportive of our trip.

I feel like we are kind of cheating at the start of our sabbatical. We are spending our first few weeks in BC which always feels like home. Zachary and I left Feb 7th, a couple of days earlier than the rest of the family to do a quick side trip to Vancouver island to see my parents. We launched into island life in one day and went walking, fishing and crabbing.

We drove with my parents to our awesome vacation rental at Silver Star (near Kelowna BC) and met up with Steve, Nicholas and Lucas who had just flown in. It was super to have my parents and Oscar-the-dog stay with us for a few days. It’s also been nice getting a “real winter” after months of no/little snow in Ontario so we’ve been skiing every day, either downhill or cross-country. It must be mentioned that I am now officially the 5th fastest downhill skier in the family, or as Lucas would put it, I’m “dead last”. Luckily I’m still holding strong in #3 position in cross-country.

We leave for Japan in a little under two weeks, so for now we’re spending a lot of time trying to get to all of the final little planning details and other admin while we have reliable internet/phone/text connections. You should see the expertise we are developing around how to book crazy activities for the kids on Japanese websites we barely understand.