Our Plans Changed Too

Way back in November 2019, a year and a half ago, we created this blog and entered the initial post.  We completed the mentioned truck purchase in January 2020, and were in the midst of finessing our plans and route, and researching truck campers that would fit on the 14-foot flatbed.  Tom was figuring out what maintenance and tweaks the truck, which had mostly been sitting for five years, would need before driving it tens of thousands of miles.  We had the property on the market, and were getting some interest, and one of our biggest points of discussion was where we would go first.  This depended on where we found a camper that would suit us, the time of the year we would leave so we would know what part of the US we would visit first based on seasonal weather, and if there was anyone we wanted to visit before we started our big trip.

Then, Covid.

We spent most of the first half of 2020 doing what everybody else was doing:  following the news, figuring out how to live day to day with the new rules, wondering how long it was going to last, and coming to terms with the fact that our plans were pretty much up in smoke, and we weren’t even in a position to make new plans.  However, we found that our home here in Belize was an ideal place to ride out the pandemic, so we decided to settle in for the long haul, and come up with a plan, or at least a sort of plan, that didn’t have any dependencies on timing and which had a whole lot of flexibility.

The For Sale sign came down.

In the chaos of covid and construction, we had the truck.

The first thing we did was stop promoting the property sale.  It was still listed, but since we couldn’t leave Belize if it sold and we’re very comfortable here, we weren’t overly anxious for a sale.  We spent some time wondering how long the pandemic would last, but, lacking a crystal ball and considering the fact that a year later nobody yet has a good idea of future restrictions, we didn’t waste too much energy on that.  We weren’t terribly upset that borders were closed, because we didn’t think we’d want to travel through neighboring countries anyway, and restrictions for interstate travel in the US were changing day to day, so we didn’t know what we could do in the US even if we could get there.

And, with the covid situation here in Belize constantly changing, we spent most of our time just figuring out what we needed to do to prepare for what could have been a very long shutdown. As it’s turned out, Belize has handled the crisis remarkably well for a small country with limited resources, but there were enough points in time where we, and everybody else, were just waiting to see what happened.  Through this time, we didn’t mind putting our future travel plans on hold, since just figuring out how to navigate the crisis took plenty of time and energy, and we were happy to wait.  But, eventually, we started to get a little itchy and began coming up with a way to keep the dream alive and feel like we were making progress.