Breakfast with Lisa & Josh #37

Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

I want to talk for a bit about this current climate of futility that seems to be everywhere right now, especially as it relates to making plans during this pandemic. I know, a bit of a bleak subject, but one that’s been on our minds a lot this week. Maybe you’ve been feeling this too.

I hope you have found some way to cope with this, and that this story resonates with you in some way. COVID has been seemingly destroying everyone’s lives and plans out there right now. And we feel ridiculously lucky to be able to do any of the stuff we’ve been doing over the past 6 months.

I hope you’re able to find some way to cope with the unpredictability, to be able to find some level of happiness as this thing just seemingly goes on forever. It’s been a pretty stupid few years for sure, and we just wish you the best with whatever has been going on in your lives lately. We’d love to hear you vent about how COVID has messed up your plans, if you feel like you’d like to share - email us back here if you think it would help to write it out. It just seems like it’s on everyone’s minds, and like so many people are at the breaking point with this thing never ending.

Anyway, on with the story -

You see, over the past 7 days, we’ve gone through the process / spin cycle of coming up with 3 entirely reasonable plans for the next few weeks of our lives, and then went through having each of those plans immediately shot down, one after another, by absolutely uncontrollable forces.

Plan A: My parents were supposed to fly over to meet us just a few days ago. They were supposed to already be here, and we were going to travel all around Thailand, Japan, and Cambodia - we would get to see some family and experience things together! It was going to be amazing!Cause of plan failure: Because so many people have been testing positive due to Omicron, Thailand, like many other countries, have changed their rules for entry to require a 7 day quarantine. If someone tests positive, they are forced into a 14 day quarantine in a hospital. The risk was just too high for them to fly right now. See you hopefully in 3 months, parents. :(

Plan B: Book some non-stop flights to Nepal! We were going to do the Annapurna Circuit and see this beautiful country. Oh man, we were SO excited for something different. We were so ready to head somewhere new—new weather, new culture, new challenges, new everything. Cause of plan failure: Shortly after doing 3 straight days of research, we realized a few things - 1. Flights to Nepal were being cancelled left and right, as were many flights headed out of Bangkok. Omicron was going out of control, and the airlines were shutting things down to save on costs.2. It was actually way too cold of a winter to be able to do any of the things that we wanted to do.3. The process and requirements of getting into Nepal had changed 4 times in the past 10 days, and we felt they would assuredly change while we were there. Who knows if we could actually leave, or go anywhere else from there even if we could.Someday, Nepal.

Plan C (from 2019): We were going to go to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, or South Korea to travel around.Cause of plan failure: All of these countries announced that they were intending to reopen at the beginning of 2022, but all pulled that back as soon as omicron came to town.See you in maybe April, one of these these countries. Hopefully.

So now we’re onto Plan D, a plan that we had never thought that we would do on this trip at all. Back in 2019, before all this COVID plague changed the whole world, we had planned a trip around the world seeing all of the amazing things we wanted to see, and doing all of the amazing things that we wanted to do. Right now we were supposed to be exploring Tokyo with my parents, right before heading to see the temples of Kyoto, and then taking the next flight out to Hong Kong before flying to Cambodia. It feels like I’m describing not only a different world, but a fully parallel universe, right? Just 24 months ago that trip would have likely been possible. It’s incredible to think how long this thing has been going on for.

But that’s the thing that we’ve been fighting this whole time - this futility, this continued attempt for months-into-literal-years of trying to claw back a bit of that normalcy, a bit of that trip of our dreams that we worked so hard and saved so long to make happen. To just see a small glimpse of hope that maybe, just maybe, we would see things reopen instead of constantly closing.

It was that dissonance between our expectations of our trip that we wanted to have before, versus the actual state of the world right now, that was making us feel very, well, depressed. We were being so unreasonably optimistic, for so long - trying to fit the ideal trip that we had planned into the neverending-new-normal COVID world of today - I think we’ve finally given up. I think we’ve finally accepted that we need to change the way that we think about, the way that we plan these trips. The world has changed, travel has changed forever - it’s time we get with the new program.

We had to do the hardest thing that there is to do in this world - take our own advice. We needed to slow down. We needed to stay put for a while. We had been telling ourselves to do this through our own videos since we set out. I think we’ve said the exact phrase “we need to slow down” at least 100 times since our van life days. Not only that, but no less than 50 of you out there have given us the advice to try slower travel over the past 6 months.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ve booked a house in Chiang Mai for the next month. And we’re going to stay here, explore this amazing, beautiful, welcoming place, and stop having FOMO about things that are literally impossible for us to do right now.

We still have hope, believe me - but I think we also have a bit of realism. It’s about time, honestly. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

Maybe hearing that you’re not alone in having your plans shot down time and time again has helped you in some way. I really hope so.

I know, we’re always supposed to like… end these things on some bright note, wrap it up with a bow of optimism. We kinda did, but it feels extra hard to do that with this. Maybe it’s best to just leave it like this.

Videos this week

This video is explaining all about the new plans that we have, and how we made that decision. It’s a happier video than this email, I promise :)

We also tried to out-gift each other at the best night market in Chiang Mai. This one is awesome - give it a look!

So, that’s it for this week. More videos coming soon!

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/3wstHhf

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