And then COVID-19 Happened
In what is perhaps the most unsurprising announcement ever: March 2020 threw us and all our plans for a loop. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that for 99.99% of people in this world, 2020 is not going as we planned. For some, it’s mild annoyances. For others, lives have been changed, livelihoods destroyed, and families torn apart. To say it’s been a challenging time is an understatement. To sum up my feelings: 2020 can go f*ck itself, am I right?
Chris and I are weathering this storm very well, luckily. We fall into the first category so the pandemic and the changes it has brought has really only caused us mild annoyances. Well, in hindsight they are mild annoyances. At the time, it’s possible I might have had a big, fat ugly cry. Who knows.
Before a pandemic, when we could actually hang out with people.
But we both kept our jobs and were able to keep working. Since Chris works from home, we joked that his life has changed very little. My schedule changed a lot, but, again, on the spectrum of what people are dealing with it was mild and we are fortunate.
But it did seem to change every aspect of our plans for selling our house and moving. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that all of the changes haven’t been a bit of a bitter pill to swallow. It felt like we waded through YEARS of trying to figure out why we were unhappy, why we wanted to change things, how we wanted to change things, and then just as we developed a plan to make those changes happen, BAM. A freaking PANDEMIC happened and laughed in our face.
We had planned a 2-week vacation/scouting mission to Hawaii from March 31 - April 16th. The trip was to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary as well as visit Hawaii and, you know, make sure that we actually wanted to move there. I. Was. So. Excited. Plane flights booked. AirBnBs reserved. HOURS spent researching where we should go and how we should spend our time.
Even in early March, as states started shutting down and we started to hear reports about hot spots in Seattle, I was adamant that we were going on our trip to Hawaii. “Unless they physically block me from getting on the plane, we are going.” I think other phrases you might have heard included, “We’re not with a tour group or anything, so they can’t stop us.” And “awesome, we’ll have plenty of room on the airplane to stretch out!” Now, obviously, it all seems very ridiculous.
Chris and I enjoying a tropical vacation in Mexico in 2019. The kind of vacation we were hoping to have in Hawaii. Photo by Lillie Elliot.
Finally, about 2 weeks before we were supposed to leave, Chris quietly suggested that we think about postponing the trip. I balked, but he reminded me that if all the restaurants and museums were closed, then we wouldn’t be able to have the trip we wanted anyway. That was the first time I acknowledged that we might have to postpone and started trying to come to terms with it. A few days later, the governor of Hawaii gave a press conference and begged people not to come visit at that time. And a few days after that, he instituted a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone coming into the state. So in the end, it wasn’t our decision at all. On March 31st, the day we were supposed to leave, I looked at Chris as he went upstairs to his office to start working and said, “Happy ‘we should be on our way to Hawaii for our 2 week 10th anniversary trip’ day.” He looked at me and said, “why did you have to tell me that was today?” “Because I love you and, therefore, want you as miserable as I am,” I informed him. Ahhhh, marriage.
When will we reschedule? Will we reschedule? I hope so, but right now we just don’t know. We’ll have to see what this summer brings and how our work schedules look. I’ll confess that we’ve considered just cancelling our trip and saving the money to put towards our move. People I mention that to say we would be crazy to move to Hawaii without having visited there first. And I get it. It’s certainly not ideal. But do you know anyone who has been to Hawaii and said, “Man, I would never want to live there.” Yeah, me neither. So we’ll see.