Sooooo did anyone else experience a once in a generation global pandemic that put life on hold for a chunk of time?
The last time that Joanna and I left the country was five years ago for a week-long Taiwan trip in 2017. I caught a bit of cancer during 2018 where the only travel I was doing was going back and forth to the Mayo Clinic to get treated. We got married in 2019 and I wrote my latest blog post in December 2019 where I optimistically said “Joanna and I are returning to Japan at the end of March to catch the cherry blossom season for our honeymoon so expect blog posts for that trip.” Oh how wrong I was…During the first few reported cases of covid in Jan/Feb I was frantically checking the WHO website report for Japan every day thinking “it’s only 16 cases, it’ll go down right?” and then “It’s only 100 cases, plus it’s basically just a cold right?” But then we were like SHUT.DOWN.EVERYTHING. And then almost overnight we found ourselves playing jackbox games, working from home, hoarding toilet paper, and thinking it would all blow over in 2 weeks.🤦
Do you remember when we were at this point of the pandemic?
We made the best of it though, just like many households who were cooped up at home for an undetermined length of time, we made the rational decision of getting a 2nd dog. Her name is Honey, she’s a whippet, she’s almost 2 now, and is Joanna’s spirit animal.
Quick health update for those who have followed my blog when I was going through chemo: everything is good! PTL! I’ve been going to get checkups every 6 months, I actually have one coming up soon. I got really into biking this summer and was doing close to 50 miles a week. Joanna and I still don’t know if we can have kids, but babies get in the way of traveling so we’ll let future us deal with it sometime next year. I still can’t believe I’ve been cancer free for 4 years now. Time flies when you’re not being pumped full of poison! For those who have not been introduced to Derek (I named my tumor) you can check out my blogs I kept here: Link
I am VERY excited to turn this back into a travel blog. Last night I was clicking around while totally clueless because it’s just been so long since I’ve posted anything travel related and I just had all these thoughts and doubts of “Do I even know how to do this anymore? What if the stuff that I write is boring and no one wants to read it? Have I lost my touch?”
I think the best way I can combat the self doubt is just to just sit down, get stuff out there, and trust that YOU, my reader, can give me feedback on what I’m sucking at or what you want to see more of.
OK on to the good stuff. I usually reserve this site for international travel only because a single post takes me about 2-3 hours a night to clean up photos, blog, edit, and post online so I didn’t blog about our trips last year. I’ll do a mini post though where Joanna and I did manage to get vaccinated and boosted last year in time for Hawaii to open up. We booked a trip to Oahu and the big island in August of last year. I had reservations about going as I was thinking that it would be lame and it’s super cliche that it’s where couples go after they get married. I was so wrong, we had a blast during the week and a half on those two islands because there was so much to do and so much food to eat.
After we came home, we still had some vacation time left. I put together separate itineraries for Sweden, Germany, Iceland, and Puerto Rico and presented them to Joanna to get her thoughts. She asked “Can we just go back to Hawaii?” where we did exactly that, visiting Kauai and Maui to finish off the 4 main islands haha
It’s been a year since those trips and we’ve been itching to go somewhere this year. I’m actually writing this blog post on the flight to Paris! I found out that my good friend Chris, who I met in the Philippines, was invited to a wedding in his hometown of London in September. (You can read all about the day I met Chris in this post because it’s a good story: Link) I figured it would be a great opportunity to visit Europe since I had not been yet, partially because I’m self conscious that my last name is “Loo”.
Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out for us to overlap schedules, however he did give me a bunch of great places to check out while we’re in town.
There isn’t too much planned for this trip, but we will be in Paris from Friday to Tuesday, take the train up to London in the afternoon, then fly home on Sunday morning. I booked a few restaurant reservations, got tickets to some museums, and we’ll be doing plenty of eating along the way.
I invite you to follow me on this new chapter of the LoosYourselfAbroad site as I eat crumpets, baguettes, croissants, and all other finely crafted European carbs
Love this blog Andrew. Love hearing about your travels and so happy to hear about your health update!! Hugs to you & Joanna! 😍
Aw thanks Andrew for checking up on me, life is going great!