Leaving on a jet plane

Travelling covidly

Hi everyone, I’ve set up this newsletter as a record of the next few months as we (Tanya and I) travel to Europe to be with our son, Noah.

Noah has been working in France since early 2020, just before Covid, and although he has managed to return to Australia in that time, he is likely to be away for a while yet. We miss him a lot and figured that if we were going to see him in the next few years, we would have to visit him.

Six months ago, we started planning how we might do that.

It hasn’t been easy, but we are grateful we can do it all. I’ll explain the process we went through in future posts, including getting approval to leave Australia, an extended French visa, immunisation requirements and the rest of it.

C'est la galère!

This newsletter won’t be a travelogue: more a record/reaction to what it is like getting around in a time of pandemic. How other countries are coping with Covid-19. How Australia looks from a distance.

While we’re away, I’m putting most of my social media on hiatus, to break the spell of that mindset, to come at these newsletters fresh.

To be honest, as I write this, a few days before we are due to leave, I am terrified our flights will be cancelled, that some form we were meant to fill out has somehow been missed, and that we will be turned back at the gate. Documenting the process is one way of handling the stress, I suppose, and hopefully others will find it useful or interesting, or gain some insight into this aspect of our brave new world.

Anyway: this is a bit of a soft launch for Transmittable Stories. I will do something more official soon, before I suspend my social media accounts.

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