Sounds like a fabulous trip! If you are going to be sleeping onboard the cruise ship, you may want to check with them regarding the need for converters. When we traveled to Europe a couple of years back, we found a lot of excellent information from Rick Steve's travel forums online. With regard to cell phone use, we found it worked best (and least expensively) to buy an unlocked cell phone on ebay (which only cost about $30) and then buy a sim card from a local provider at our destination. This way, we had excellent phone coverage at our destination. HTH and that you have a wonderful vacation!

I'd appreciate suggestions for a literature course I'm designing for my son's 9th grade year. He would rather work on computers than eat or sleep. He does enjoy reading books about history, though. In the library, he heads straight for the nonfiction sections, and my attempts at introducing him to the classics have not met with great success, so far. I am new to this forum but have found quite a bit of good advice already, and I appreciate everyone's willingness to share great ideas for curricula. One post I found suggested that an intro to lit course should include an epic, a political novel, a funny novel, a collection of poems, a play, a work by Shakespeare, works by both British and American authors, works by both men and women, and works by people of color. This sounds like an excellent plan to me. I'm thinking of using Les Miserables as the epic novel and Julius Caesar as the Shakespearean play, but I would love to hear other recommendations for particular works.

K12 international academy has an introductory C++ programming course. It's definitely not free, but it does look interesting. Here is a link to the scope and sequence page: http://www.k12.com/courses/scope-sequence/tch-060/