3 - Home time with family, South Australia, March - April 2022

 

Entry 3 – Home time with family, South Australia, March - April 2022

It was late in the day and we were driving home from a month’s holidaying at various locations on the Yorke Peninsula. We had a phone conversation with Steve’s sister who was living in our house and she had just been notified she was a close contact with a person who returned a positive test to the covid-19 virus. It was the period of the covid-19 pandemic and we had been lucky to avoid most of the covid-19 mayhem - that was.

We were about hours’ drive time from home. It had been a long day with a late afternoon decision to drive home in one day instead of a planned two days. It was around 7pm with caravan park offices closed for the day’s trading. We immediately stopped and researched options available for us. We decided to make a right turn, spending the night in a carpark on the outskirts of Adelaide at St Kilda playground. This allowed us time to discuss our options and actions we could implement to best stay safe away from covid-19 infection.

We woke very early in the morning (4am) and decided to drive through town, avoiding busy city traffic conditions. It was the easiest drive we had experienced travelling through the city of Adelaide with a population of around one and a half million people.

Our caravan pantry was looking bare, we were down to our last half roll of toilet paper and the fridge shelves were empty. It was 5.15am, and we had made our way to the other side of the city, parking in a shopping centre carpark waiting for it to open at 7am to obtain our needed supplies.

We booked into a caravan park nearby our home for a week awaiting the authorities recommended timeline where hopefully Steve’s sister could be declared free of any covid-19 symptoms.

We had returned to Adelaide for a gathering of Steve’s family, to celebrate his dad turning 90 years. Our Canberra based son drove the 1,200 kilometres to Adelaide with his family for the 90^th birthday celebrations and we met up with them at Mary’s family farm for a lunch gathering en route to Adelaide. It was another one of those bonuses, with more enjoyable family time

We stayed on at the caravan park for almost 2 weeks where over the last 3 days Steve’s family gathered for dads 90^th birthday celebrations. It had a beautiful beach setting and the weather gods provided some beautiful weather conditions. We played at the beach, shared meals and were presented with a personal musical performance. It was a fabulous family get together.

Steve’s sister was cleared of any covid-19 infection and we returned to our home.

We were kept busy for the next month and a half getting organised for our daughters approaching wedding. Our daughter was living in Canada where she was getting married. As an example, the mandatory travel paperwork trail was enormous, with constantly changing requirements implemented by different governments around the world grappling to address the pandemic may-hem. Even our booked flight legs from and returning to home disappeared from our airline schedule. Two weeks later we secured addition flights from our home town adding around another 12 hours to our original booked flight time lines.

We even cleaned out our caravan, wrapping it up for the first time in ten years of fabulous travel times throughout Australia.

Right up to our departure time there was a surreal nervous atmosphere. Was it really going to happen, with the constantly changing travel rules worldwide? This trip had been originally booked for 2020 which consequently, was flushed away by the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. We were constantly monitoring different changing government rules along our planned flight route, attempting to comply with requirements at the time of our flights. Holiday travels provide a special well-being atmosphere but it also involves a lot of work, much reiterated by our Canada travel planning.