Is It Safe to Travel During COVID-19?

We Decide Whether to Travel During the Pandemic

It’s time for us to make a tough decision. As everyone knows, international borders have been mostly closed over the past few months. That is starting to change and some countries are now open depending on which country you’re coming from or which passport you hold.

As full-time travellers, now we’re wondering what to do. Just four months ago, we were enjoying a leisurely trip in Italy. Then COVID hit and we found ourselves first stuck in Italy and then on a rescue flight back to our home country of Canada. Since then we’ve been sheltering in place in Toronto and wondering when we might get on the road again. Our vision for this time in our life was to be exploring the world. Some borders are now open but is it responsible and safe for us to leave Canada?

Today we’re debating all the pros and cons of traveling again and, at the end, we’ll share our decision with you.

Our situation

We’ve been travelling full time since we retired early in 2019. We were living out a big dream that we’d been working towards for so many years. But like everyone else, we had to put our life plans on hold when COVID hit. We took shelter in Toronto so we could be close to family and have been here ever since.

Life in Toronto

Before we get into the pros and cons of travel, we’ll start with what life is like here in Toronto during the pandemic. Like most other places, Toronto has been in a state of lockdown for a few months with some services gradually reopening very recently.

Of course, we’ve taken care to follow all the safety protocols. We are social distancing; we only go inside stores for grocery shopping or essential services and then we always wear a mask. When we see family and friends, we do our socializing outdoors. And most importantly, we sanitize our hands frequently, especially if we touch anything anywhere outside our own home.

Reasons to stay

First, Canada is our home country. It will never be closed to us and we don’t need a visa to stay. And of course we have access to the Canadian health care system. Another important reason to stay is, of course, family. After living abroad for the past seven years, we’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to spend lots of time with our family, even though it’s socially distant.

Finally, the pandemic is not over and it’s unclear when a vaccine might be available or when the world can return to normal. In the meantime, the international situation is very much in flux. There are flare ups of COVID-19 in various countries and travel bans are still in effect, depending on where you’re traveling from and the country on your passport.

Reasons to travel

On the flipside, this could also be a reason for us to resume travel. The pandemic is going to continue and affect our lives for some unknown period of time into the future. We appreciate that we need to make adjustments but life can’t completely stop. As long term travellers, we need to work around this challenge while remaining safe just like everyone else.

Which brings us to the next point: We don’t have a permanent home in Canada. If you’ve been following our videos for the past few months, you’ll notice that the background has changed as we’ve moved through three different Airbnb rental apartments. We’re also not prepared to rent for the long term or buy in Canada. So we’re living a nomadic life wherever we are.

Another reason is cost. The cost of living in Canada is more than we have budgeted for in our first few years of retirement. While we do have an emergency fund, we weren’t expecting to blow it all on Toronto rent.

As we shared in our recent cost of living video, we’ve only been able to stay within our budget by cutting out most of the extras, like dining out and entertainment. We know that we can get a lot more value for our dollar in lower cost countries.

The final reason is that a number of countries have now opened up to Canadians so travel is an option again. In fact we feel very privileged that we can cross borders during this time because many of our American friends have very few options for travel right now. For example, our fellow nomads over at Go With Less have talked quite a bit on their channel about the need to constantly adjust their plans as the international situation evolves.

What is our decision?

If you haven’t guessed by now, we have decided to resume our nomadic lifestyle, but we have many caveats. First of all, we’re not fast travellers; we’re slow travellers. We spend a month or two in each country, where we live our everyday life. So our life on the road doesn’t look so different from regular life: we live in one apartment for a month at a time; we cook most of our meals at home; we’re not running around to tourist attractions every single day.

We feel that this style of travel is more appropriate during these risky times. And we’ll maintain all the same safe practices that we follow here in Toronto. And, in fact, many of the places that we could travel to have much lower COVID rates than here in Canada.

Of course, we had some concerns about taking a flight since it means being in an enclosed space with other people, which is something we’ve been avoiding since our rescue flight back to Canada. However, we did a lot of research into the risk of air travel and learned that the cabin air is fully cleaned every 2-3 minutes. And we’ll be flying with an airline that requires masks be worn and keep our hands and surfaces around us sanitized too.

Once we’re in a new location, we’ll monitor COVID rates and plan our time accordingly. We’re prepared to stay longer than usual in each destination if that helps us stay safe. We’ll keep our plans flexible based on the evolving situation.

If you’re interested to find out which country we’re going to, we’ll be letting our newsletter subscribers know first. You can sign up below:

And if you want to make an educated guess about where we’re going, you can check out our slow travel bucket list. These are all the places we visited as fast travellers and hope to return to in the future for a much longer stay.

Is It Safe to Travel During COVID-19?