We have been planning this trip for over 18 months. We wanted to do it the year after Elizabeth's dear mother passed away (partially because it was a reminder that life is relatively short and traveling to Portland every other week for more than a year while working full-time took a huge toll on her). Our son, Martin was a Senior and he wanted to (understandably) graduate from Bainbridge schools. So we decided to wait until Martin graduated and spend a year preparing for the trip....
Herman gave away most of his landscaping clients in the summer and fall of 2019. This way he could concentrate on fixing and finishing things that needed to be done on our property in order to either sell or rent the house. Elizabeth requested an unpaid leave of absence in January 2019 which our school district can grant for a year. Herman did a lot of research by taking books on early retirement and travel from the library as well as listening to countless podcasts about nomadic living, early retirement, investing and travel stories. During all this Elizabeth was still working full time teaching fifth grade. The initial plan we had was to check out possible countries that we might want to spend 3-5 years in as a sort of early retirement time. Not necessarily with the idea of not working, but places where the cost of living is lower. We guessed we might potentially still become engaged as volunteers or work at an international school. We planned to go for three months Sept - December to central america to possibly check out Costa Rica and Panama and to improve our Spanish. Following that we had hoped to either spend part of December in Chile with friends or head back to Washington to spend the holiday with our kids. Then we were going to travel to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Croatia before we had to be back in August for the start of the 2021 school year. The only part of the European trip that was booked pre-COVID 19 was in February to stay in a rental house in Monte Gordo, Portugal. This is because Herman's parents would be in that area for the winter months and we were planning to overlap with them. In addition, my father and Tessa were hoping to fly out together to travel to England and Portugal to celebrate her December 2020 college graduation and to visit us.
THEN CAME COVID-19...everything changed...
Starting March 2020, all three kids ended up at home and Elizabeth began virtually teaching 5th grade. Tessa and Anika moved back in with us and all 5 of us were working/studying from home and living together again for the first time in 4 years! This was a fun, yet uncertain and challenging time together. We loved having a "full nest", yet our plans were underway for avoiding the first year of an "empty" nest! After much discussion and planning, we decided to rent (as opposed to sell) our house on Bainbridge Island and in the beginning of September we moved into our rental property in Bellingham where our daughter Tessa had lived the past two years. Martin ended up graduating and deferring his acceptance to Western Washington University in Bellingham. Instead, he opted to join an intensive 15 week intensive course to learn coding, Coding DOJO. He is scheduled to finish in late December and then hopes to land a virtual coding job. He has shown great focus and commitment and is doing well so far. He lives with our new home base in Bellingham along with two other students.
Selling, discarding, prepping and moving was a chore. It took us most of the summer. Although, we were able to get in a couple of fun camping trips, hikes and mountain bike rides as well! It was late September before we were settled enough to pick up with our planning for this trip. We had read a lot about house sitting and looked into 5 websites that help match sitters and pet/house owners. We settled on trying "
Mind My House" and in one day sent applications out to 6 possible house sitting possibilities. We did not necessarily expect to hear back from these. We also still explored the option of going to Costa Rica first as it was scheduled to open up for Washingtonians to travel there in mid-October. In the end, there were a couple of house sitting possibilities in Europe so we decided to head to The Netherlands and purchase a second hand camper (we are hoping we can resell it at the end of our trip) and explore the possibility of house sitting. With the van we feel independent and mobile to deal with whatever comes up. We are fortunate to have Anika starting her Master's back at the University of Delft, so we could purchase the van in her name and "borrow" it for our trip.
Elizabeth was very nervous about flying during COVID. We wore N95 masks the entire time (except when eating or drinking) and we wiped down our seats and trays. The airlines actually hand passengers disinfectant wipes as they enter the plane. The first leg of the trip was pretty crowded with a 3/4 full flight from Seattle to Chicago. In the airports it was easy to socially distance. The flight from Chicago to Amsterdam was virtually empty with only 14 passengers and 7 cabin crew plus the pilot and co-pilot. This is because only European nationals and their immediate family members were allowed to travel to The Netherlands at this time.
Here is a photo from the second flight:
as you can see, we are basically all alone!
as you can see, we are basically all alone!
Comments
Post a Comment