THE FLIP FLOP LIFE

The other day, I suddenly felt tired of travelling.

Anyone that knows me a bit would know that this is NOT normal.

When I told Frank, he said that he felt the same. “It is no wonder”- he added, “since we had been in transit for several weeks…changing houses almost every week”. 

No kidding.

Four weeks “in transit“

Indeed is now almost four weeks since we started our return home. It feels a bit like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

We had to be in the area of San José (Heredia) a few days before the flight to do the two Covid tests, close the bank account and cancel the car insurance and generally prepare for leaving. Then, we couldn’t board the plane because we missed some papers for our cat we had to stay in the San José area for almost another week. In total: 10 days in San José just preparing for travelling. During that time, we changed houses once. Luckily, they were close to each other.

When we finally made it to the Netherlands, we had to stay in preventive quarantine for 10 days. We stayed in a cute little house in a vacation park, where there was almost nobody. It was the perfect place to land in Europe, both physically and mentally. It was quiet, sunny and amazingly spacious considering that it was a small house. 

After the quarantine, we moved to the house of Frank’s family for another week. We wanted to spend some time with them, catch up with some friends and allow some time for our dog to adapt to our return, before taking her with us. 

Finally, we left the Netherlands at the end of March and have safely arrived to Sweden.

All in all, this long transit has been very tiresome for various reasons:

1. The “unpacked” business

One of the consequences of this long transit has been to live surrounded by unpacked suitcases. While we were still in Costa Rica, it made no sense to unpack the suitcases since we were going to leave in just four days. When we couldn’t board and had to stay another week, the argument was that we didn’t have any space to unpack. Plus we were also leaving soon. 

Back in Holland and during the quarantine, we only opened the suitcases to take the very few long-sleeve clothes that we had, which were very few. When we left Europe back in January 2020, the “Covid-19” didn’t exist, we couldn’t have foreseen that we would need to be in quarantine and thus we had very few winter clothes with us. So, for 10 days, we had been surviving with what we had available. Finally, when we moved to Frank’s family home, we did not unpack the suitcases, since we had some winter clothes that we had left there and we were on our way to Sweden anyway. 

I can tell you that it is tiresome to live surrounded by semi-open suitcases for a month. 

2. The endless arrangements (of travelling in Corona times)

Another consequence of this long transit due to Corona is that we have spent a considerable amount of time arranging the next steps in the travelling.

Together we had to arrange 7 Covid-tests (4 Frank and 3 me) required for travelling (all negative, by the way), rebook flights, request again the pet in the cabin, prepare the cat papers, order food for the quarantine, book accommodations, look for the possible routes to Sweden, pick up the car, take the car for inspection before the trip, put the car back in traffic, check once again the country regulations for travelling, book the ferry and long etcetera….

Needless to say, arranging for all this travelling takes an idiotic amount of time. 

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3. Difficulties working

So, it is no wonder that we both have found very difficult to work in the past month.

Either we were busy with the travel arrangements or too jetlagged … or a combo of the two.

We could only start working 100% when we were halfway through the quarantine in Holland and during our stay in the house of Frank’s family. 

 So, we have some catching up to do in the following weeks. At least it is good that we will be working from home for now and with no distractions. Or so I hope…

Welcome to Sweden!

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