Hello everyone. Hello, whether you are elsewhere, at home, in “quatorzaine” or not. A simple “Hello” followed by “How are you?”.

I will not discuss cancellation insurance, preventive measures or government directives. Others have done it and will do it better than me.

I want to know how you are doing. Really. Are you safe? How are you doing? Tell us about what is unraveling in the context of a cancelled or changed trip, what remains to be done, where you are today. Just to encourage each other.

To read you this week on the Facebook group it was, let’s say, a roller coaster.

Torrents of stress, procrastination until the official guidelines became clear: “I go – I don’t go?

Monetary or point losses that were anticipated and then confirmed, at least in part. Hard-earned though.

Or the opposite, points that come back because they were paid off but without the project they were supposed to allow.

The impossibility for some to resume this trip or to move the vacation. A birthday or retirement that should be celebrated…

Some of you are so stunned that you have become mute. I know that, we have written to each other.

The penalty. Fear. MAYDAY MAYDAY calls. The choice to stay abroad since we have already left. The choice to rush back and the anxiety of not finding flights to return.

The INTERMINABLE wait to reach the airlines that are overwhelmed by the number of calls. For once, we don’t doubt that: “we receive a lot of calls, please excuse us…” but the fact remains that if “your call is important to us…music…music…” it often ends with a click after three hours of waiting.

Feeling of powerlessness sometimes?

How are you milesopedians? After all these hours of preparation, anticipation, accumulation, optimization grids that characterize our hobby. To end up in a final where the majority had to give up.

Are you disappointed, grieving, already too busy with the kids at home to even think about it? Or not touched at all?

So confined, are you already bored? Or do you relish the thought of the Netflix hours or spring cleaning hours ahead?

If your shows and outings are cancelled, will you at least go out? The weather is nice and my neighbors’ kids are playing field hockey in the street here. Unless you have the virus, have been in contact with an identified carrier or are in “quatorzaine”, you are still allowed to go out you know!

I know some who have already gone to the nursery to get their seeds. Others, tons of toilet paper rolls and all the flour bags available at the grocery store.

Will we start making our own bread again, Quebecois darlings?

Are you concerned about the combination of teleworking and having children at home?

What headache are you currently facing? Or on the contrary, have you been lucky enough to escape it?

I know that you no longer question the measures taken and to be taken. That you will apply them. But can we at least allow ourselves to say that we are saddened, disappointed or happy and forget, even for a moment, the flag of moral rectitude and the sense of collective duty? This post gives us the right to do so.

I was lucky to return from South Africa on February 19, to be symptom free and somehow still have to show up to work without worrying about my child…in his 30s.

I will book an MTM for March 2021 within a month. I want to keep dreaming. I will cancel my week in Nashville at the end of June if necessary to visit my daughter who has just moved there. It would only be a postponement.

But maybe everything will be settled, right?

I had time to visit my aunt and mother in a retirement home before they were forbidden. And already, we were no longer kissing.

I’ll go to the grocery store later: I hope to find something there.

And then I thought, although for most of us, midlife is an unknown phenomenon, the method has been used many times throughout time. But we are talking about a real quarantine, not a “fourteen”.

The plague and cholera in the Middle Ages, does that ring a bell? And closer to home, if we review our history, do you remember those immigrants from the British Isles and later from Ireland? They were to spend these forty days on Grosse-Île, near Quebec City, to ensure that cholera and typhus did not enter the inhabited territories. A museum still testifies to this.

I was also thinking that this partial sidelining could perhaps serve as an opportunity for some very slooow travel?

Depending on our condition, are we content to discover a small corner of our town or our land? We are still far from the measures taken by Italy where outings, even to the grocery store, are supervised. Who among us will bring back a good example of a discovery in this sense?

We will try to take care of you, dear members, in our own way. With articles more adapted to the situation but which will allow us to pursue what brings us together so much: travel better and save money.

Maybe some ideas for more local destinations. And then some riddles on the theme of travel to make you work your brain and have fun.

As usual, let’s stick together, give each other support and congratulate each other on our good deeds in this pandemic that affects all humans on our planet to varying degrees.

I invite you to comment on this post on the Facebook group.