Wandering Educators

There's a moment every summer when the whole neighborhood smells like wood smoke and something wonderful. Someone's grilling and smoking. You can hear the sizzle two yards over, smell the smoke from your fishing boat across the lake, and suddenly your dinner plans change (yes, really!). Every summer, that neighbor is us. Over the decades, we've used a variety of charcoal, hardwoods, and grills (a confession, though: we don't own a pellet grill).

Our daughter walked into Pier Cottage on our first morning in Co. Kerry, looked out at Westcove Harbor, and did not want to leave for two weeks. By the first morning, she was foraging seaside blackberries for breakfast (we ate them over rhubarb yogurt! SO good). By the 5th day, we learned how to go shrimping in our tidepools (and found an enormous crab skeleton, which led to an impromptu science lesson).

Most people assume activating an eSIM is technical. It is not. The entire process takes less time than waiting in a coffee shop queue, and once you understand what each step actually involves, you will wonder why you ever bothered with a physical card. The confusion mostly comes from carriers and device manufacturers burying the instructions in menus that were clearly not designed with first-time users in mind.

Ideally located in the Mediterranean along the Adriatic Sea, Croatia is a genuine travel treasure. Did you know that Croatia has over 1,000 islands? Rivaling Greece for Europe’s prettiest archipelago, the country offers countless photogenic destinations on both the mainland and the islands. While walking the ancient walls of Dubrovnik gives you a bucket-list experience, high summer means sharing those historic streets with thousands of other visitors.

After almost two decades of publishing Wandering Educators, I can usually tell by the second paragraph whether a submission was written by a person or created by a machine. It is rarely one big thing that stands out to me. It’s a series of smaller things, stacked up and causing unease in my brain: the rhythm, tidy paragraphs, sentences that all land at the same length, like fence posts. There is a complete absence of anything you could point at.

You may be a teacher who splits the year between two countries. You could be a graduate student whose campus is always changing. Or you may be a parent who moves between homes in different parts of the country. For all of you, arranging a reliable, consistent source of in-person support for any number of health-related issues can be incredibly difficult to schedule. In-person clinics are located in one location. Your life unfolds in many places. Your calendars rarely cooperate.

Emotional challenges are not the only hurdle in starting over in a new country. This major life change requires a lot of logistics, which many can't coordinate until they're already in the middle of it. Administrative tasks can add up quickly: visa processing, municipal registration requirements, health care enrollment, the process of opening a bank account, school enrollment for your kids, etc.. Those who have a relatively smooth transition into the country are not just lucky.

Rising from the Solomon Islands, in one of the most remotes places on earth, a new sculpture by Jason deCaires Taylor continues the artist’s ongoing Siren series, works that give form to environmental warnings that are often unseen or ignored. deCaires Taylor is one of our favorite artists (read our articles about his global underwater art here).

Ever spent more time waiting outside an administration office than you did in the lecture you were trying to get to? If you have been through university life, there is a good chance you know the feeling. You head off to register for a course and somehow end up standing in a line that barely moves. You need a quick meeting with an advisor and suddenly you are navigating booking systems, forms, emails, and office visits that feel far more complicated than they should be.

This is NOT a 'how to stay on a diet' or 'how to keep losing weight' type of article. If that’s your journey, you do you, but you won’t find any advice on that here. I’ll focus on something much more important, which is how to keep eating healthy when you go back to college. During summer break, you go home and probably eat home-cooked meals for the most part. That doesn’t guarantee that you eat 100% healthy, but it also means you’re not living on sandwiches and TV dinners.