One More Month

Time has flown.  We have covered some serious ground in Western Europe.  We have averaged greater than 10,000 steps per day.  John has studied Spanish with tutors for 20 hours.  He has completed 5 of 9 books.  We completed the navigation sections with some trigonometry, vectors and piloting skills in addition to celestial navigation.  We are preparing for a test on Chapter 5 in math—here are the highlights for that-- Combine like terms, isolate the variable, multiplying or dividing by (-1) requires flipping the inequality sign and dividing is the same thing as multiplying by the reciprocal…now you are ready for the test too! 

John uploaded his essay on Roman civilization to Google Docs for his social studies class.  He was able to answer the learning objectives and describe first-hand what the ruins were like in each place we visited.  I am only one book ahead of John, so I have to get back to it!  We start our faith, music and physics of sound subjects at the end of this week.  Lots to do and see, still.  We enjoyed the sun and warmth of Southern Spain and Portugal, now to colder, northern, central Europe with Bavaria and Austria up next.

This amazing map showed the treaty of Todesillas, which divided the new world between Spain and Portugal.  One funny thing- longitude was critical component of the treaty, yet hard to determine.  One suspicious thing, Portugal kept arguing for a specific bias to the west, and it just happened to cede them most of Brazil.  They probably had been close enough to see that something was there before finalizing the treaty. With this visit to the monument to the explorers and maritime museum in Lisbon, John completed the explorer section !!

Monument to the explorers, a journey much worse than flying coach :)