Homeschooling Vacations

Next week my daughter and I are going to be traveling across the country on a train. The ENTIRE country. We're going from New Jersey, to New York, to Chicago, to California. I've made this trip before, once by myself and twice with my husband, but never with a child, never in coach, and not in about a decade.
We will be staying in California for about a month. I figure if you're going to make such a big trip, you may as well make it worth it. It's only the second time she's been to CA to visit my small family as well. We'll also be out there for my brother's wedding and my daughter's eighth birthday.
The one concern I have is that I've always had sleeping accomadations for the trip between Chicago and California. It's three days and two nights. This time I just can't afford it. I am mostly confident that my daughter can handle it. She's small so comfort isn't an issue for her but I'm kind of worried I won't be able to sleep at all. We'll see.

Since we are going to be gone so long, we had to deermine what we're going to do about her schooling. Taking a vacation for an entire month would be detrimental. A lot would be forgotten over the course of a month. I think that Latin would suffer especially.
What I decided to do is plan on getting at least two weeks worth of work done while we are gone. Maybe three. We'll have the laptop with us so that will reduce the amount of paper we've got to worry about.

There seem to be two schools of thought when it somes to scheduling a homeschool year. Some people follow the public school model, starting in September and going through to June, with a break at Christmas and Easter, and comprising of about 180 days. My thought about that is, if you're going to reject the public school model for everything else, why burden yourself with their schedule? Here's how we do it. We didn't start out this way, it kind of evolved into this over the last few years and it works pretty well.

I break up the year into 36 weeks. This is because pretty much every curriculum we buy fits neatly into a standard 36 week year. I break up the 36 weeks into 4 9-week segments. Each week has its goals that we usually dont have any trouble meeting. These are:
1 Latin lesson
1 week of science lessons (the NOEO curriculum is broken up into 4-day weeks)
1 History week (the History Odyssey curriculum has weekly goals)
3 math lessons
1 spelling lesson (the spelling book is 36 lessons long)
4 grammar lessons
1 Writing Strands week
and some handwriting practice in there, usually a workbook page every day.

It should be noted that instead of the typical 5 day week with a 2 day weekend, we do school 4 days a week. We go out on Sundays and we don't do school the two days per week that my husband is home from work, which varies from week to week.

At the end of each 9 week term I've scheduled a vacation. Most are a week long but I make one 2-week vacation as well. So, at minimum, our year is 41 weeks long. We also will skip a week every now and then due to illness or extreme summer heat. Also I may scoot things around so we're not doing school around Christmas or the week of her birthday.

So, including vacations, our year never adds up to 52 weeks, meaning that we are starting each grade earlier in the calendar year than the last grade started. At this pace she should finish up high school a few years earlier than her peers. No big deal. as long as she continues to be able to handle the material I don't have a problem with it. It is amusing to see people's reactions when she tells them she's seven years old and in third grade already. Even more amusing is when she tells them her favorite subject is Latin. It's almost embarrasing though. While I am proud of her progress, I don't want to look like a show-off.