When I started this blog just over a year ago my plans were to share travel experiences - from the past, the present, and those that I hoped to experience in the near future. Stories about where I’d been, my favorite recipes, my favorite languages to learn … I’d planned on retiring from work, maybe moving to Mexico, continuing to cruise … And then Covid-19 happened … and everything came to a halt. We were basically booted out of Mexico, retirement plans went out the window as jobs were lost, the cruise industry shut down – and hasn’t recovered yet … and hope seemed to dwindle that the way of life we knew might be gone for good ☹ I lost some interest in cooking - grocery shopping that used to be enjoyable was now an adventure trying to avoid getting sick; it didn’t make sense to study languages 3 hours a day – where was I going to use them if I couldn’t cruise?; and writing about past cruises / vacations was painful – great memories, but what if I could never travel again? We had a cruise planned for late November, but with the ‘No Sail’ dates being extended past October it didn’t seem likely that we would be able to go – and that we would need to cancel – and we wouldn’t be able to get the same deal and couldn’t afford to go ☹ But a bit of light came by the other day … our cruise company has an option to push your cruise to a year ahead (November 2021)– and with the same perks and pricing as the original 😊 Now, there is no guarantee that they will still be able to sail a year from now – but as I told the agent – if that happens, the world is going to be in a pretty bad way and not cruising will be the least of our problems 😊 So now we can dream a bit about the cruise; I can still practice all my languages with a destination in mind (cruises are the only time I get to use Indonesian, Turkish and Filipino ). Now, because of my practicing languages, I watch a lot of Netflix Global TV series in different languages (Polish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Danish, etc.) and apart from the historical dramas most of them show how people live in these countries today. I last travelled to many of these places from the late ‘70’s to the early 2000’s – a lot has changed since then. Most of the Scandinavian cities that I had been to were unrecognizable ☹ It makes it hard to describe travel from past memories – but … it’s like I’m discovering these places for the first time … and it’s great!! So I believe I’m going to start describing these places – and where to go, and what to see – from the perspective of watching these shows … and doing some further research on the best tourist locations to go to. If you can’t travel to these places now physically … at least you can travel there virtually … and hopefully when this pandemic is done … and we can travel again … you’ll have a good idea of where you might want to go!! So enough of my rambling … but I now feel more excited than I have in a long time … and I will keep travelling at home, and learning about different cultures, countries, culinary experiences … until I can travel and cruise again!! 😊