Adventure by Chicken Bus: An Unschooling Odyssey Through Central America by Janet LoSole
Adventure by Chicken Bus: An Unschooling Odyssey Through Central America
by Janet LoSole
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
My Ratings 4.5/5
Synopsis
Embarking on a homeschooling field trip to Central America is stressful enough, but add in perilous bridge crossings, trips to the hospital, and a lack of women's underwear, and you have the makings of an Adventure by Chicken Bus. Buckling under a mountain of debt, Janet LoSole and her family are at their wits' end. Determined to make a drastic change, they sell all worldly possessions and hit the road. With only a few items of clothing, a four-person tent, and little else, the family visits a sleepy island backwater in Costa Rica to save endangered sea turtles. In Panama, they bounce around like turnips in the back of a vegetable truck to reach an isolated monkey sanctuary. In Guatemala, they scale the ancient Mayan temples of Tikal. In between tales of begging rides from total strangers and sleeping overnight in the jungle with an indigenous family, Janet endorses community-based travel--supporting local businesses and favoring public transportation called chicken buses. She also writes candidly about what it takes to travel long-term with two little girls amid the chaos of border crossings, erratic drivers, and creepy crawlies lurking at the edge of the jungle.
My Thoughts
The success of any great travel book can be measured not in awards, but in miles. The sheer distances they take our imaginations, and the miles they inspire us to hike, drive and fly—those are the things that matter when it comes to these books. And sometimes, reading a travel book can book can be as transformative as the journey itself. Reading Adventure by Chicken Bus: An Unschooling Odyssey Through Central America by Janet LoSole will change the way you travel? This book is like a dream you want to last forever.
It's a book about her adventures traveling for nineteen months through Central America with her husband and their daughters, ages eight and five, occasionally sends a chill down the spine of any parent, an inspiring tale which draws you in with its honesty. In Janet LoSole's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of places, or chance, or fate, or reality... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the traveling―an art that was, in the end, Janet LoSole's strange and inscrutable gift.
The reader can't help to initially assume the book is a type of travelogue. But the journey becomes so much more and certainly unlike any type of traditional travel book. I don't know what I can say about this book other than that it is among my very favorite books of all time.
The writing seems simple and straightforward, but always, somehow, understated and impressive.
Highly Recommended!
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