There’s no better time than a cloudy day to start a substantial update journey documenting where we’ve been over the past three years. Time really does fly—and so did we—primarily during the infection rate dips of the pandemic.

In an upcoming posts, I’ll start with our trip to Bangkok in January 2020 and how we witnessed the very early days of the pandemic—before it was really on the radar in North America.

From Southeast Asia, we thought we could outrun COVID by spending February 2020 travelling across Australia: Perth, Melbourne, Sidney and Brisbane—but we just couldn’t shake it. Things began escalating very quickly and by the beginning of March we were in a race to get back to Canada before all flights were cancelled.

The rest of 2020 was a loop of staying at home, masking up, outdoor gatherings, getting vaccinated, and praying that life would return to “normal.”

We spent the winter of 2020/21 bouncing between Calgary and Vancouver when we weren’t outright banned from travelling altogether.

An upside of the pandemic was that we gave greater consideration to things we could do in our own, expanded, backyard. In the summer of 2021 we did a few hikes in the Rockies and spent several days scouting out vineyards (while dodging forest fires) in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. And as flights slowly opened up, we ventured back down to Vieques, Puerto Rico.

It was during the summer of 2021 that, with fingers and toes crossed, we booked flights to Buenos Aires for another winter away. We made sure the tickets were fully refundable, since COVID, its variants and worldwide restrictions were changing weekly. Argentina had reopened to tourists six weeks before we arrived. As luck would have it, we got to Buenos Aires just as Omicron was percolating as a more contagious strain. As nice as it was to be away, we limited our trip to two months and we were extra cautious (as were the locals, who were themselves coming out of a strict and lengthy lockdown).

We returned to Canada at the end of February 2022 and, giddy from our new-found travel freedom, booked a 10-day trip to London in April.

Frank’s valiant attempt to dodge COVID came to an abrupt end after we returned from London, despite multiple vaccinations and boosters of every type available. Thankfully his was a mild bout and somehow I was still able to steer clear of the bug until July—also a mild case, where a few days of fatigue was the most noticeable symptom.

The remainder of 2022 involved a few quick trips to Vancouver and another to Palm Springs, finishing up the year with yet another trip to Buenos Aires. Looking for a more interesting path home in March, we boarded our first ever cruise ship and sailed from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. A monumental 32-day, 17-port adventure.

So stick with me kids. In subsequent posts, I’ll provide more details on each of these trips. New adventures (even the places we’ve been multiple times), varied experiences, tips on deals we found and several more travel hacks — and of course, a plethora of photos.