Family Gap Year Post #7: Starting Over

So the big Family Gap Year is officially completely unraveled! I’m not quite sure why I put an exclamation mark there. Maybe because it was a lot of work to unravel it and I’m glad I was able to get it finished? (Because I am definitely not excited that the trip is dead in the water.)

Every month, we would save money and book an AirBnb. We had booked them in rural Ireland, a small town in the French Riviera called Antibes, a more rural part of Norway outside of Oslo, the hills of Tuscany, Florence, a small medieval town in Croatia, a beachside town in South Africa, a beach in Phuket (Thailand), a rural part of my favorite area in Australia, New Zealand (outside of Auckland), and a surf town in Costa Rica. We hadn’t yet booked a little time in Melbourne, Sydney (for New Year’s), Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest. We were going to be in France for our friend’s wedding, and we had free housing at a boarding school in the Swiss Alps where a friend of ours works.

So close, yet so far away!

In the end, we only lost about $700 in refund fees. It’s a huge relief that we were able to get everything else back.

So now what? My dream is New Zealand. I have always wanted to go there AND they are handling the COVID crisis really well. And yet part of how they are handling it well is by keeping people out—ESPECIALLY Americans!

I’ve applied for a special visa program, so we’ll see how that goes. They are not currently processing visas. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the life I have here as much as I possibly can!