Like Sands of the Hourglass, So Are the Days of Our Lives

When will travel (and life) get back to “normal?” Or at least some semblance of what it used to be like? You know what I'm talking about, right? The days when you wanted to book a flight from Sofia to Riga and didn’t have to worry about what country might let you transit through their airport or when you could find a flight that didn’t have an overnight layover.

Is it soon? I'm ready for it. So very ready.

Travel hasn’t been easy since the pandemic started and full-time travel has been a real challenge. Borders open and close seemingly at random. Limited flight schedules means overnight layovers, often in countries where we aren’t actually allowed entrance. Airbnb prices skyrocketing, rental car prices are crazy (if you can even get a rental car), new covid waves in southeast Asia and South Africa, new variants popping up here and there in Europe… these are all things we have to stay in tune with.

What does this mean to a full-time traveler? For us, it means:

1) We try to pick destinations where we are fairly confident the border will be open.

We base this on the country's past covid border policies, current covid border policies, and their handling of covid in general.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/map-international-travel-restrictions-covid-n1262372#embed-20210301-travel-restriction-world-map

2) Can we get there? No matter how open a country's borders are, if there are no planes, trains, or automobiles that can get you there, it won’t make the list. This was the problem with our planned trip to Mongolia this summer. The country has been fully open to vaccinated travelers since May 10th, but there are no flights into the country and the land border is closed. Every time we book a flight into the country, it ends up canceled a few weeks later.

3) We avoid rental cars when we can. This was something we did even pre-pandemic. We like popping on public transportation: it usually saves us money and we don’t have to stress over the responsibility of taking care of a car. Or, wondering if a car will be available. On our recent trip to Denver, we landed on a Monday and had a rental set up for $170 for the week (reserved long before the rental carpocolypse). Enterprise had no cars available and couldn't find a car for us until Tuesday evening. Fortunately, they honored our daily rate and didn't charge us the current daily rental price of $125/day!

4) We negotiate a flexible cancelation policy with our Airbnb hosts. Generally, we book our airbnb stays for 28 days or more to get deep discounts—sometimes as much as 50% off! Airbnb overrides the hosts cancelation policy for stays over 28 days. If you cancel, you are charged for the first 30 days and are refunded the remaining balance minus the Airbnb service fee. But airbnb will honor any agreement you have in place with the host. Since borders close last minute and flights seemingly disappear even when borders are open, we have found its important to make sure anything we book can be canceled with a full refund, especially lodging since it is usually our biggest expense. Sometimes we will book for just 27 days to get really flexible policies that allow us to cancel for no reason at all up to a few days before booking. In those cases, we'll look at what the host offers for monthly discounts and ask for that discount for the 27 day stay. We’ve been lucky to find hosts that have been willing to work with us on cancellation policies and discounts.

5) We try to remember that this is supposed to be fun! Waking up to an email about a canceled flight isn’t fun. But how we react to the news makes all the difference. We get to choose to be frustrated, disappointed, outraged, etc… or take advantage of the opportunity to reassess our options.

After two weeks here in the US, it's easy to see how people may not realize covid is still wreaking havoc in the world. We’ve been out and about catching up with friends all over Denver. Sitting on patios on summer evenings, life feels very back to normal. People are out and about hugging, laughing—all mask free. Meanwhile, friends in other parts of the world are still under lockdown and waiting for vaccines to be available. Looking around at how “back-to-normal” everything feels in Denver, it's like I'm in a bubble. How lucky people are in the US to have things open and go mask-free with no curfews!

Here's hoping our next stops are as lucky!