What's up with 2020?

2020 started out with so much promise, but quickly changed as a pandemic called Covid-19, or the Coronavirus, took hold of the world causing massive disruption to people's lives, killing hundreds of thousands of people (at the time of this post), reeking havoc on economies  resulting in a worldwide recession, and cancelling people's ability to travel freely as they please. We had some pretty amazing travel plans ready to go - a family wedding in Mexico, a summer trip to the Greek Islands to celebrate my graduation, and we were toying with a winter jaunt to our regular sunny destination- Hawaii; this time planning on visiting the actual island of Hawaii. But none of it was meant to be in 2020...for a time there it seemed like we'd have to be happy with spending the year reliving all the amazing trips we had the opportunity to enjoy prior to 2020. After Covid arrived here, I quickly started to feel like this and probably somewhat in this same order: 

But thankfully as summer approached we were, at least where we live, given the green light to explore our own backyard and we took advantage of the opportunity and planned out a 2 week road trip. OK, by now anyone reading this blog knows that by "we", I really mean Z. So actually Z spend a bunch of time planning out an amazing road trip for us and ended up making it extra special because my birthday was during the trip and he knew that I was really bummed that we wouldn't be going to Greece. It was still fairly touch and go and whether we would head out on this road trip until probably about a week before we left. In fact, Z planned out two different road trips depending on what the Covid number would be looking like right before we left. One option  would take us two weeks driving up the Interior to the Canadian Rockies, before circling back through the Kootenays and into the Okanagan, while the second option kept us a little closer by heading up to the Interior before trekking down to the Okanagan with more stops in different parts of the Okanagan. In the end, we felt comfortable with heading out on option one, the Canadian Rockies. While this trip didn't take us to a land far, far away (by plane), we did end up driving about 3600km all told.