Like most people, we have been working and staying at home for several weeks now.  We’re not on the “let’s get back to normal immediately” plan either so we will continue to self-quarantine for now.  Steve and I are both very lucky because we both have jobs that allow us to work from home pretty seamlessly and we are incredibly grateful for that.  For now, we only go out once a week for groceries and we wear masks, wash our hands, use sanitizing wipes and hand sanitizer when we do and we try to keep the trip as short as possible.  Other than that, we each go for morning or afternoon walks a few times a week and we give other people a wide berth when we do.  I’m doing a ton of cooking but we will get curbside takeout once every 7 to 10 days when I get sick of it or am tired.

Traveling was a huge part of our lives so that has definitely been put on the back burner for awhile.  We cancelled a trip we had planned to the U.S. Virgin Islands in April.  We were going to spend 5 nights on the island of St. John and 2 nights on St. Thomas.  As of right now, we have tentatively rescheduled our VRBO on St. John to mid-October but will move it again if needed.

We also currently have a trip planned to Santa Fe, New Mexico in early July and we assume we will be cancelling that one as well.  We were going to stay in a rental home but I went ahead and cancelled that before the nonrefundable deadline period ran out.  Our airfare is still booked but I’ll likely cancel it and get the credit to use for later.

Our big trip for the year is 9 days in Chile in late November.  I haven’t bought the airfare for that trip yet so I am doing the ‘ol “wait and see” for now and if things have improved, I’ll probably take the credits for my cancelled flights and apply it towards the airfare for this trip.  I have put down deposits for hotels already but I have until October to decide if I want to cancel them or not.

Pretty much all other travel is on hold for us.  I’ve been thinking about where we would like to go if/when all this is past us and things can safely reopen.  Greece is high on my list, including Santorini and perhaps Crete but I also love the idea of Southern Spain and Mallorca or Southern France again (the French Riviera was one of my favorite trips ever).

I’d also consider something much further away like New Zealand or perhaps South Africa.  If things seem relatively safe in a few more weeks/months, we may do a long weekend trip somewhere we can drive to and rent a private home or condo, like the Florida Keys or the Sarasota beach area.  For now, we will continue to park our butts at home and dream of future vacations.  I’d love to see them find a good treatment or vaccine for Covid-19 ASAP so businesses can reopen, kids can back to school and life can start getting back to normal.  My little travel worries are total first world problems and I’m really not trying to whine about our cancellations b/c I know we still have it pretty good but I miss how things used to be.