Why on Earth are We Land Locked Instead of Ocean Bound?

Given I have decided to re-activate our blog I need to start with a big catchup of where we are and why.

We are not in the Med. We are not on our beloved Intention in Greece. We never expected this but who could have predicted anything much about the last 18 months.

Firstly, let me start by saying we are both enormously grateful to be safe and healthy in such uncertain times.

As the pandemic marched its way across the world and as the time we should have been packing our bags approached we sat at home looking at the reality of getting back to Greece from Australia. And we came pretty quickly to the realisation that in order to feel we weren’t going to be a burden on Greek medical system that we would need to be vaccinated. It would also help with our own peace of mind when flying and transiting through airports as well. Trouble is Australia’s vaccination program has been glacially slow and given the 12 week wait for the second dose of AZ vaccine it has meant getting out for this summer season (May to October) was looking increasingly unlikely.

The other thing that we couldn’t overlook is the current Australian government policy on travel. We are one of the only countries in the world that is actively preventing its citizens from both leaving the country and returning. We believe we could have been given permission to leave as having an asset that needs care and maintenance is considered a good reason to get an exemption to leave and we would be leaving for 6 months, however getting home is the big issue. There are 40,000 Australians trying to come home at the moment and the numbers being allowed in are very small. We would add ourselves to that queue. Therefore we believe that we would need to leave knowing it may be impossible to return when we wanted to. It could take months to secure a ticket home and we could end up taking a seat from someone who really needed to be able to return.

So what do we do with those valuable months that we are now stuck inside Australia?

Well enact plan B, of course. Along with all the many people who can’t leave home right now we decided to buy a campervan and head north in search of winter sun and wind for Rick to kite surf in.