Very cool post and I'm glad to hear that homeschooling is catching on. When I was 12, my parent pulled me out of school for a year and sent me on a trip with my grandparents. We went to France and spend months traveling to Paris, The Riviera, and visited many castles. Then we drove through the Pyrenees mountans on our way to Spain where we stayed in a fishing village with my uncle and worked on his fishing boat.

I learned more that year than all my years of school combines and was so glad my parents decided to do that.