Quarantined, Furloughed and Addicted to Travel

Quarantine. Social distance. Stay home. Stay safe. I know we have all heard these words countless times recently. 

Being a travel enthusiast, the thought of staying in England and not being able to tick off more countries from my travel bucket list was a hard pill to swallow. Two trips were already booked for 2020 and my sadness heightened knowing these were unlikely to go ahead. 

My birthday trip to Barcelona and Dubrovnik has already been missed and we have now pencilled this in for 2021. I am hopeful my safari trip in August to Tanzania with my mum and sister won’t need to be rearranged so 2020 isn’t a complete disappointment. That said, I am realistic about the fact that it will probably need to be. 

To add to the disdain of 2020, I have been furloughed from my school on a reduced pay, meaning the money I could be saving to travel has been lost through furlough. I am by no means moaning, and I am very aware that I am extremely lucky to even still have a job and little worry of money and my future finances. So, I am not dwelling on this fact too much, particularly as it has given me a lot of free time!

So, what does a travel enthusiast do when they cannot travel or plan to travel? Here are a number of things I have filled my time with to keep busy and distracted:

1 – Learning Spanish! This is likely to be the most useful for my travels. I have put my free time to good use by learning a new language. Having never studied Spanish at school, I have tried to learn Spanish on a number of occasions - normally a little bit once a week picking it up randomly across the year. I have updated my Duolingo app and I am working through this a little bit everyday. I have learnt a lot of new Spanish words, phrases and useful grammar rules. I can only hope that I will be able to use this soon, when we are finally allowed to travel again. In the meantime, I’ve just got to keep practicing.

2 – Exercising! As you are probably already aware from my other blogs, or because you are a friend of mine, or have at least met me (haha), I like sport! Now when I say I like sport…I LIKE SPORT! This means a big hole has also been left for me – no playing netball or rounders for me! No sport to watch on the TV… it's very weird not watching any football or tennis at the moment! To fill this void I have taken to home circuits, walks, runs (where I can with my dodgy knees), cycling and netball skill practices. 

What has helped to keep me motivated with this is a routine. I am currently doing the following;

• Weekly workouts with my netball team (Mavericks Netball – Bristol)

• Weekly Team Bath Netball workout online

• Following an online instagram personal trainer (Courtney Black)

• Cycling with my boyfriend

• Long walks daily with my dog (we have found a lot of new places we didn’t know existed!)

• Following a home yoga challenge (Adrienne)

What has really driven me to keep this going, is feeling the difference in my fitness level and seeing the difference in my body shape! Having been promoted to Regional 1 next year with my netball team, this is also keeping me motivated to be ready for when the new season is allowed to begin. As well as hopefully finishing with a bikini body for when that sweet, sweet first holiday is ready to go! 

3 – Baking/cooking! Coincidentally when this all started, we had just signed up to Hello Fresh. This has definitely reignited my love of the kitchen. As I’m sure most people do, we always tended to make the same meals, which could become a little mundane. Hello Fresh has made us try new meals and menus and it’s been quite exciting trying new flavours and meals.

It has also confirmed my love of Asian food (anywhere in Asia is back to the top of my places to travel next!).

To add to our cooking, we have also been baking. We have made numerous loaves of banana bread and lemon drizzle cakes, I would hate to try to count these. We have also baked lots of different types of bread, made scones, cookies, flapjacks and muffins. While writing this, I am becoming very aware of the amount we have eaten… I am therefore happy that I have also been doing point 2 in excess! Otherwise I fear I would be piling on the pounds during this quarantine! Haha! 

4 – Watching too many films and TV series! Netflix, Disney Plus, Sky Go and Amazon have been great friends of ours! Here is a list of our quarantine favs:

• Marvel marathon

• All the Disney live animation films

• Money Heist

• Tiger King

• The Last Dance

• Dead To Me

• After Life

•Some embarrassing but good trash TV too:

- Celebrity Ex on the Beach

- Too Hot To Handle

- Love is Blind 

- Made in Chelsea

Also, some great sport fillers too:

- Steven Gerrard documentary

- Bobby Robson documentary

- Fittest in Dubai

- Fittest on Earth

- The Fittest Film

Having all of this variety to watch has kept us sane in our downtime and again given us something to focus on/work through.

5 – Board games, quizzes and drinking games! We have actually been entertaining ourselves quite well with board games, scrabble, table tennis, beer pong and quizzes on Zoom against family and friends.

This has been actually really fun and a great way to spend some quality time together off your phone, as well as a date night once every two weeks! The quizzes have been a particular highlight for us.

Weekly we have been doing a Thursday night quiz with my netball team and a Sunday night one with my sister and some of her friends. I have also had a trivia quiz online with my best friend and her friends in Australia which was awesome! It has been not only fun but educational. I actually do feel like I have learnt quite a lot by doing them, including a number of different countries flags (important for the travel devotee in me)! I question how little I actually knew before, haha! 

Well, there you have it, a travel enthusiast’s quarantined life in a nutshell. It’s not all been educational, worthwhile and life changing, but it’s kept me mentally and physically well during this time. I have not really had a lot of downtime to be honest and I definitely haven’t been bored! Do I miss travelling? YES! Am I still thinking about my lack of it? YES! But I am certainly going to appreciate that first trip again when it comes, probably more than I have ever before! The next things that I am going to do during this time are some online courses and reading more books!

Look after yourselves and I look forward to seeing everyone on the other side!