Hello from Houston

Tags

coronavirus, COVID-19, home, pandemic, quarantine, rule breakers, rule followers

The group of friends moved together on the pier, jostling and laughing, one boy hip-checking another, three girls giggling in a group hug … “Noooooo,” I find my brain screaming,”Separate! You can’t be that close to each other!”

Six feet apart, fellas, six feet!

Is my hometown another place where people are not following government restrictions on gathering? Well, yes, sort of, in a few places, but that scene described above is an example of what I’ve been yelling at people in movies and on the pages of the books I’m reading! Our new normal has become so firmly entrenched in my mind already that I am not even distinguishing real-life physical contact with fictional or virtual closeness. What will this do to our post-COVID lives and attitudes, I have to wonder?

Silly reactions and philosophizing aside, we are here in Houston being rule-followers, like many of my blogging friends from all over the world. We canceled our trip to Southeast Asia in February for fear we might get stranded there, and now we are looking at those destinations as perhaps safer places to be right now than in our own individual-liberty-obsessed land (1).

My beloved running routes along the bayous are now packed with stir-crazy people wanting to get out of the house. Most are well-behaved, sticking to their side of the paths and maintaining appropriate physical distances. Some are still way too bunched-up with groups of friends, and a few infuriating idiots are passing balls and tackling each other, climbing over the closed dog-park fence, or taking turns pressing their grubby fingers down on the water fountain spigot. As of today, I will be running in the streets; they are emptier anyway, and I am less likely to work myself up over the rule-breakers.

Here in my house, my husband is working non-stop from an upper floor, trying to keep his company and its customers solvent. We are lucky to have his continued salary and the ability to buy some extra food and leave a few generous tips when we get takeout meals. My own paltry pay (barely worthwhile in normal times) has stopped as I cannot do much work for my employer from home. Last week I was a whirlwind, cleaning and baking and organizing, and now I’m feeling like a lazy slob.

Yesterday, we escaped with an outing a few hours west to see the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes that sprout each spring on the roadsides of Texas. The giant freeways were empty on our way out of the city, the shopping centers and car dealerships eerily deserted. Being in the country was therapeutic and temporarily calming, but now we are back in the house, J very stressed and I at loose ends.

I’m aware that this is the worst post I’ve ever written – disjointed, incohesive, and just plain boring – but like others, I wanted to connect in some way with the wider world (2). Please stay safe and healthy and sane as we all work together to stop this virus.

ADDENDA:

(1) It bears noting that I greatly value the individual freedoms our country affords us, and I am very lucky to have been born here. But I also value science, common sense, community spirit, and public health, so sometimes those personal rights need to be subjugated for the common good, and I think there are people and places that are understanding that better than we are right now.

(2) I need you, readers! My three kids have about had it with my incessant texts and emails, jokes and cartoons! 🙂

This is Not Thailand!

Tags

Antigua, CENTRAL AMERICA, changing gears, coronavirus, Guatemala, Southeast Asia, travel problems

The bags were 99% packed, and all systems were go for our trip to Southeast Asia on Wednesday evening. And then they weren’t. What changed? As I noted in my last post, we’d wavered a little on leaving for a long vacation in a place increasingly affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but all of our knowledge, intuition, and local contacts suggested that we were extremely unlikely to actually catch anything.

Including our flights! We’d already rebooked our return flights (a time-consuming and stressful task), which had a problematic Hong Kong layover. As the number of virus cases mounted, however, we began to rethink the seven regional flights we had booked and even our return via Tokyo. We didn’t have that many destinations, but many of our flights involved layovers back in Bangkok, and we started to eliminate some of them in an attempt to salvage our trip.

With every adjustment, we ran into a domino effect of problems. Eliminate Cambodia and the four planes associated with just that one stop? Oops, no flights from Luang Prabang to Danang a few days earlier. Spend more time in Chiang Mai? Nope; Laos was already getting short shrift, and what was the point of flying for over 24 hours to get to Asia and then cut our top destinations short?

Neither our friends on the ground in Thailand and Vietnam nor our families in the U.S. pushed us in any one direction, but there were plenty of signs that this might not be the carefree and fun vacation we had planned six months ago. We are not retired and have obligations at home, and we could ill afford a problem at any point with a return. Though getting sick was not even on our radar, getting stuck or, worse, potentially quarantined based on where we had been, was a worry.

It did us in. Call us wimps, but we wanted to really enjoy this trip and not just get through it. Thirty-six hours before takeoff, we pulled the plug. Before I canceled all the flights, hotels, guides, and drivers, we went online, searched for cheap fares to anywhere we’d never been, and bought tickets for Guatemala for one day after our original departure date. We didn’t even really have to repack the bags!

So here we are in Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala, where we landed two hours before we would have in Bangkok even though we left a full day later! It’ll be a short stay, but it’s a nice consolation prize for the trip to which we sadly bid adieu. For the next few days, we’ll speak Spanish and climb volcanoes, but we’ll be headed back to Bangkok and all of our other SE Asian stops in November if all goes well!

Buenas noches, all, and thanks for all the support throughout our decision-making process!

To Go or Not to Go?

Tags

Cambodia, coronavirus, Hong Kong, Laos, Southeast Asia, Thailand, travel dilemmas, Vietnam

It’s countdown day 10! A mere week and a half separates us from takeoff on our long-awaited flight to Bangkok and Southeast Asia. We drained a couple of frequent flyer accounts for some cushy Business Class seats, and we cashed in a bunch of hotel and credit card points for a string of comfortable hotel stays throughout Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

We made plans to meet several blogging friends; we have tours set up and hikes charted out. I’ve practiced my Vietnamese greetings and refreshed my internal map of Bangkok’s streets and the way to a fun rooftop bar. I’ve even started a little pile of clothes and toiletries, shoes and sunscreen, plane entertainment and sundry supplies.

But with each passing day this week, our trip becomes a little more untenable. The Wuhan, China-based coronavirus is putting a growing crimp on things, and it’s not because we have any real fear of getting the disease. Our concerns now are that we could get stranded in a country that has decided to close its airports (we route home through Hong Kong, for example), or that once in Southeast Asia, we will find things shuttered or devoid of life.

A few days ago, we were still gung-ho on going. Fewer crowds – yay! We are not going to China itself – no problems for us! The news media always overblow everything, we rationalize. Today, we are beginning to worry for real. Bangkok department stores are scanning temperatures, Hong Kong’s streets are emptying out, a few more cases are cropping up in the countries to which we are heading. What if …? we keep asking ourselves on a burgeoning list of topics. Wahhhhhhhh!

Unwinding the trip may take as long as planning it out. Can I shift everything to fall; will we be safely out of the woods with the virus by then? Will my airlines and hotels let me make changes or cancel without massive fees? Where else might we escape in these two and a half weeks we have carved out of our busy schedules?

I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts. Do we stay or do we go?