Remember when I blogged about the Happy Caravan? That’s the name of a big happy musical family of 11 children and 2 parents, aka the Marc and Amber De La Motte family. They are leaving NYC and moving back to CA right now. 45 years ago, this summer my family did a similar move. We also moved from New York to the West.

If you need more of the backstory of the move, including what brought them to NYC and why they just moved from NYC, go here.

The differences between my family’s move and the Happy Caravan move are: 1. We left upstate NY, not NYC, 2. We moved fewer people (7 instead of 10, with 3 of the De La Mottes out of the nest and not moving with them) and 3. Our destination was UT, not CA. The other two similarities are 1. Moving in the summer and 2. Camping along the way. Except the De La Mottes are using a camping trailer, and we did tent camping, if you can believe it. Of course, I just thought it was fun, at age 9, but my parents carried a burden of stress and daily chores with that camping-along-the-way move. They deserve a medal!

Anyway, I just love big families, homeschooling, road trips, and music, but not moving LOL. Since this family is into all those things right now, I’m having fun sharing their videos. I’m interested to see what path their musical journey will take after the return to CA, which they left a few years ago. Will they return to the music teachers they left? Will the children leave one by one on their own to go back to NYC to Juilliard or the Manhattan School of Music? How many of the children will end up being professional musicians? Will the family stop paying for all the music expenses (instruments and lessons) until they get out of debt? I’m curious about all of it.

I wish them all the best on this new chapter of their big musical family adventure!

The video above shows their arrival coming back home to San Diego! They made it! Yay!

The ones above and below show them settling them into the new/old house, and who actually owns it.

In the video below we see them having their first birthday party in the new/old house.

How did they get the trailer into the driveway? Watch below!

Here’s some good news and bad news about the new/old house.

It’s back to Suzuki lessons in CA!