Summer Travel During COVID-19

Figuring out where to travel during the pandemic

The decision has been made. After almost four months of sheltering in place in Toronto, we’re about to resume our life of slow travel in a world that is still in the grip of a pandemic.

This was not a decision we made lightly. When our travels came to a sudden halt in spring, we knew that we needed to carefully weigh our future options. In last week’s blog and video, we went over all the pros and cons for whether we should start traveling again. As many of you know, we are full time nomads with no home anywhere in the world.

With that decision made, the next question is where to go. To answer that, we spent time reflecting on our original plan and our journey so far.

Our original plan

If you’ve been following our story, you’ll know that we left Singapore in 2019 after reaching financial independence. This was all part of pursuing our big dream of retiring early and traveling full time across Europe and beyond. And we were pretty excited about it.

We chose to start our travels in Europe because we had just spent six years living in Singapore and exploring Southeast Asia. So we wanted to see more of Europe, specifically eastern Europe, because it would be all new to us and we were also attracted to the low cost of living.

We started in Poland, made our way to Ukraine, spent almost three months in Turkey and then landed in Italy with plans to stay for a couple months. From Italy, we were expecting to go to Croatia by ferry and then slowly make our way through the Balkans for next several months.

But, of course, none of that happened.

What happened instead

We happened to be in Italy just as the pandemic exploded there. During our first month in Italy, we became aware of COVID but had no idea of what was about to unfold.

Once we realised how serious the situation was — and once the national quarantine went into effect — we tried to leave. However, the borders closed overnight and we found ourselves taking shelter for a month in a friends holiday home in northern Italy.

Lake Como was a beautiful place to be stuck for a month. But with our visa running out and the seriousness of the global situation sinking in, ultimately we felt that the best move was to get to Canada to be with our family. We made the decision to come back to Canada on rescue flight, although we were very nervous to fly given so many cancellations and airplanes grounded.

Fortunately all went well and we made it back to Canada.

Life in Toronto

Since then we’ve been sheltering in place in Toronto. On the upside, this has been a great time to connect with family and enjoy summer in Toronto, which we haven’t had in seven years. Of course, all this time we’ve also been watching the news and waiting to hear when borders would reopen. And the news finally came on July 1st.

That’s when the EU made the big announcement that they were recommending that Canadians be allowed to travel to EU countries. So suddenly the doors were open again. With that, we decided that it’s time to get back on the road, although we didn’t take this decision lightly.

As we talked about in last week’s video, we had good reasons to not travel. Our family is here; Canada is our home country and we can stay as long as we like; and, of course, the pandemic is still ongoing.

But we also had reasons to start traveling again. We don’t have a permanent home in Canada and aren’t ready to settle here long term. Countries are open again and economies are trying to restart. Finally, the pandemic is the new reality so we need to adapt and find a way forward, like everyone else.

Selecting our destination

Of course, we’re not going to pick just any country to go to. We came up with some strict criteria for ourselves.

It needs to be a country that is open to Canadians, of course. Somewhere in Europe so we could feel like we were picking up our journey where we left off. The number of COVID cases needs to be very low. Finally, we were also looking for somewhere with a lower cost of living than Canada’s most expensive city. As we talked about in our last cost of living post and video, we found that our dollar goes so much further in Europe versus Toronto.

To help us find out which countries meet the first three criteria, we turned to a really helpful website called Travel Off Path, which has been doing a great job tracking the latest border openings.

Based on the latest information we had at the time, we shortlisted seven countries:

Croatia
Greece
Montenegro
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Spain

Once we had the short list, there was one more requirement: Can we fly there direct? Flying direct was important to us because it would help minimise the number of transit points and contact with different people.

Despite the border openings, not all airlines are flying to all destinations. So we were stuck with wherever Air Canada was going. That left us with just three options: Greece, Portugal and Spain.

First, we decided against Portugal. While we would love to go to Portugal, there had been conflicting news about whether the country was open to Canadians since Canada was not reciprocating with being open to Portugese residents. We even heard stories of people from Canada being turned away after their flight landed

We were also interested in Spain but there were two issues with that destination. First, it had a very high incidence of COVID and, second, the cost of living is relatively high versus the other countries on our list.

That left us with Greece as our number one choice, which was actually one of the first countries to actively welcome back tourists. And it also appeared in our travel bucket list so we are pretty excited to restart our life of slow travel by heading there. We are planning to stay in Athens for the first month but haven’t made any further plans at this point.

We know the situation will continue to evolve so we will stay flexible and not plan too far ahead.