Coop Goes to High School Part 3 – Summer Swap to England | Lefty Parent

Coop Goes to High School Part 3 – Summer Swap to England | Lefty Parent:

Coop Goes to High School Part 3 – Summer Swap to England

September 18th, 2013 at 15:38

My passport picture around my 15th birthday in 1970

My mom was always a smart creative person with tremendous ingenuity and a strong sense that life at its best should be an adventure. She had never been to Europe herself, but she had grown up around more economically privileged kids whose families had, and she felt this sort of an experience was an important part of a young person’s full education and development. Despite her financial limitations, she was determined to find a way to make such travel happen for her two sons.

An opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1970 when my mom heard from an acquaintance that they had traded houses with a family in Oxford England for the summer, both being big college towns with people always looking to take classes at the other university. So my mom placed an ad in the Oxford University paper and got a reply from a graduate student who was looking to come to the University of Michigan with his wife to attend a special summer program. My mom worked it out with them that we would exchange both our houses and our cars for ten weeks, from the last week of June until late August. We got our passports and my mom managed to find a cheap charter flight for herself, my brother and I from the nearby Detroit airport to Amsterdam in late June returning from London Gatwick airport in late