About

Would you like to meet the family?

This is Andrew, alias dad. He is 46. He is our great and courageous driver. I tried to find a picture of him that was not behind the wheel of Maggie or the smoke of the BBQ but couldnt. Dad can frequently be heard saying the following things over and over again. “I am so glad we didnt get that bus”,  “my mind is hungry I need to feed it”,  “just 5 minutes on the computer”, or spouting off his own version of one of his dad’s jokes saved for just the right occasion. He loves to BBQ, Drive Maggie, Read, Blog.

This is me, Debbie, mum. I am 48 and proud of it. It is hard to find a photo of me with my mouth shut. I still haven’t plucked up the courage to drive Maggie. I love to do all things creative and I love roadschooling. When you roadschool or homeschool you need to get to know your child so much deeper to find their best learning style and what they are interested. It is SO MUCH FUN! I love to sew and travel with an old hand crank singer sewing machine. I am trying to figure out how to travel with a potter’s wheel. Debbie and Andrew met in Belgium just before going on a ship that brought educational books into South and Central America. We got married over 20 years ago and have been developed stranger and stranger lifestyles as time goes on.

This is Abi. She is 14. She loves bubbles, cooking, sewing, laughing, pretending to be a cat, taking care of people. She is currently roadschooling normal stuff and home-ec (cooking, sewing, child development). She is our part time webmaster as she is good with techy things and the word impossible doesnt mean “stop” to her it just means “get more creative”. She doesnt want to think much about what she wants to do in the future as she says she got too much of that in regular school. She figures she would like at least 10 careers. She doesn’t like to read too much. She has always loved looking after people. She has had diabetes since she was 7 and refuses to let it slow her down. She is looking forward to doing some extreme sports that involve things like jumping out of planes. She wants to live on a ship for a couple of years when she turns 18 then move back to Orkney.

This is Hannah. She is 12. She is a self-confirmed information geek. She is a fountain of facts and useless knowledge. She normally wins the useless knowledge competitions with Abi, Sam and Dad. She also loves strange haircuts. She finally got her dream haircut over the summer. A mohawk. It has been green, purple, orange and natural. She loves to roadschool absolutely everything. Give her a book and she will have read, absorbed, integrated it and will be spouting out information from it in no time. Her favourite person to give cuddles to is TJ. I don’t think she has any fears with traveling. She loves to find quiet escape places all her own so we need to do a special “Where’s Hannah” check when we leave anywhere. She needs more solitary time than the rest of us and uses books to escape into whenever she can. She is our only child that we need to remind to be with people rather than read all the time.

This is TJ. She is 7. In this picture she is pleading for us to adopt yet another pet. We have thot that it is more practical to travel with no pets. She disagrees. She has presented us with multiple options for pets including a cat, a dog, a lizard, a grasshopper, a frog, a toad, a praying mantis, a camel, a goat and/or a chicken. I am sure this list is much longer in her mind. She has been sporting her own adventure backpack lately that contains her favourite animal book, a first aid kit, a water bottle, rope, a notebook and pencil a handkerchief and her zebra phone. All you need for an adventure. As she is a bit of a show-off she loves to play her piano for people and to read out loud. She loves to learn new languages because it helps her with her number one travel goal of making new friends. When she grows up she wants to travel the world on a donkey with a large group of dogs travelling with.

This is Alana. She is also not a Jones. She is a Hurst. She is 19. She wanted to travel and is now traveling with us. She is very colourful and very clever. She is American but has spent most of her life in Europe.  In addition to English she is fluent in Portuguese and Italian. She loves learning languages, cartooning and customizing her clothes. We met her with her family at Freakstock about 4 years ago. She left with Sam and Donald but the British border authorities sent her back. She will now try to get a student visa and try again to live in Scotland. She and Donald met while he was traveling with us and we went to her house in Portugal. They started dating and are now enduring a long distance relationship.

This is Liz. She is 17. She loves her saxophone and pretty mini cupcakes. They are just SOOOO cute. She left us in March as well but to go to Texas and stay with Jessica helping out with Sweet Notions. While she was with us she was roadschooling Saxophone (of course), Creative Writing, Design, French and Cooking. We miss Elizabeth but know it is time for her to stretch her wings a bit. The last months with us she talked about wanting to know what it would be like being Elizabeth rather than one of the Joneses. She craves organization, tight scheduling and strict goals. Not my areas of strength. Just a day after she arrived with Jessica they were sitting down for a morning at an all you can eat buffet setting goals for the next 5 months. Perfect! Lizzy is in heaven.

This is Sam. He is 19. Oh yes, our grown up son. He just left us in March because he wants to go to drama college in Edinburgh or Glasgow.While with us he was learning harmonica and guitar and functions (with Donald) as our own live mp3 player when we had no working sound system when we were driving and wild camping (most of the time) and he loves music. Especially that classic stuff. He was our useless knowledge dictionary for music facts. He was reading a huge complete works of Shakespeare book. He is a creative traveller that takes on the world with fearless expectation and fun. We are excited to see what crazy ideas he comes up with next.

This is Donald. He is 18. He is not a Jones, He is a Cowan. We met him in Orkney. He travelled with us for his “gap year”. He left us in March to earn some money to start University next year. He wants to study in Edinburgh to be a primary school teacher so he tutored Hannah and TJ. He was their favourite teacher EVER. We think Donald is great he brings a bit of craziness and music wherever he goes.