A trip teaches lessons that college never will.
The trip's lessons weren't lost on Masters' clients.
Many authorities used it to pay for "extras" such as school trips, music lessons and one-to-one tuition.
Getting there: Q Holidays (0870 720 1127; qholidays.co.uk) can arrange stays at Jungle Bay from £110pp a night, including meals, hiking trips, yoga lessons and a half-hour spa treatment.
Through Labor Day, parents can enjoy free time while children ages 3 through 12 partake of the Junior Staff program, which includes field trips, tennis lessons and other activities.
And on top of spending on school, there is spending outside it: the gap between what rich and poor parents shell out for museum trips, music lessons, books and so on has been widening (see chart 2).
Eastern promise The intriguingly named "Fun Korea Lesson Trip" is a new holiday offered by the Korea Tourism Organisation ( gokorea.co.uk), combining a homestay and Korean language course at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, with afternoons free to explore the vibrant capital.
But as I said in a New York Times op-ed I wrote with Trip Van Noppen, the lesson from Rio is that people aren't waiting for a document to tell us how to fight climate change or revive the oceans.
In preparation for my trip, I took lessons in the language from an elderly man in his basement flat near Baker Street.
A century after the Belgica's return, a NASA research consultant named Jack Stuster began examining the records of the trip to glean lessons for another kind of expedition: a three-year journey to Mars and back.
"Road Trip" has a serious lesson to impart.
