Travelling During a Pandemic, Part 1

It’s a strange world we live in. After the relative normalcy of Hawaii, where, despite the stay-at-home order, we still regularly chatted with our neighbors outside, and many stores and restaurants were still open if modified, it was eye-opening to go travelling around the world and to see how the pandemic is playing out in other cities. 

As you’ll recall from my last post, our goal was to move from Honolulu to England. My visa allowed me to enter the UK only between April 24 and May 24, so we had a limited window in which we could travel. Rory’s US visa also expired at the end of June, as did our American health insurance (important to have when one is pregnant!), so we felt compelled to proceed with our moving plans despite the plethora of uncertainties facing us.

In late March, as Hawaii started to implement stay-at-home orders and Rory and I began working from home, we were ecstatic to have found decent flights for all three of us for a measly $1500. That’s about a third as much as they usually cost. Maybe this pandemic won’t be so bad after all, I thought. Maybe we’ll be able to stay under our budget for moving costs. By mid-April, however, Rory, checking the status of our flights, reported that certain legs of the three-flight journey had disappeared from our itinerary. I started feeling nervous. They’ll find other flights for us, right? We’ve paid for the tickets, so we’ll get there somehow, he kept assuring me. But towards the end of April, the whole itinerary was gone. The flights just weren’t running anymore. 

I often project a calm demeanor in the face of difficulties, but this stressed the heck out of me. All of our moving plans revolved around actually leaving Hawaii on May 7. What if we couldn’t get to the UK? What if we bought more plane tickets, only to have them disappear too? Rory called United Airlines multiple times, but the best they could do was get us on terrible flights that would end at London’s Heathrow Airport. We considered various ways of getting north from London to Dumfries (where Rory’s parents live), or Edinburgh (the airport closest to them). Neither a seven-hour train ride nor a six-hour drive sounded appealing after two days of flying. We thought about buying a plane ticket with a different airline just from London to Edinburgh, but we didn’t want the hassle of gathering and re-checking our many suitcases and paying for them a second time either. What to do?

We bought new plane tickets, that’s what. The options were limited by this point, and a four-flight, 35-hour journey with American Airlines was the best we could get. Instead of $1500, (which was not refunded) it now cost closer to $4000. There was no guarantee that these flights would run either, so we just crossed our fingers and kept packing.

Our house in it's mostly-emptied state.

Fast-forward to Thursday, April 30. The movers came at 8 am and packed up a portion of our belongings to put on a boat. Over the next five days, our friends and neighbors took all of our furniture, appliances, and warm-weather accoutrements (goodbye, snorkel gear and beach umbrella), and left us with a nearly empty apartment. We packed our suitcases and cleaned our house. We turned in our keys. On May 5th and 6th we stayed at a hotel near the Honolulu Airport. Rory continued to check on our flights and thankfully, they still appeared to be running. Finally, it was May 7th, the day to fly. After eating leftover Vietnamese food in our hotel room for lunch, we hauled our three large suitcases, my cello, my violin, three backpacks, a carry-on roller bag, a snack bag, and my purse to a taxi and drove to the airport. And so began our journey.

With our luggage on the airport curb, I looked around at the familiar surroundings one last time. Half-completed parking garage up ahead, confusing green road signs indicating the way to Honolulu and Waikiki, and palm trees lazily swaying in the distance. It looked as I remembered. Except that everything else was different. No cars weaving in and out of lanes, no people hurrying to the check-in counters, no garish aloha shirts worn by tourists with lei (flower necklaces) around their necks. It was desolate. Rory pulled out a camera to capture the complete lack of activity. Instead of the usual excitement tinged with sadness that I often felt at this curbside at the start of a journey, I felt hollow, afraid. We were alone.

In Part 2 of this post, we’ll share about our journey through the Honolulu, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London Heathrow airports. 

Goodbye, Hawaii

Sunset over Waikiki.

Our blog, Turnbull Travels, has been dormant for two years. After the initial shock of moving to Hawaii wore off, and the prospect of potentially living here forever set in, I felt less need to document all the exciting quirks of life in Hawaii. Also, parenting and work took over our lives. But now our stay in Hawaii is coming to an end and a new adventure awaits us.

It has been almost three years that we’ve lived in Honolulu. While Rory has happily continued with his assistant professorship at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, I’ve had a variety of teaching jobs, ranging from being a full-time orchestra teacher at a Catholic all-boys school (I often needed those Hail Marys), to starting a violin program with the Hawaii Youth Symphony for underprivileged predominantly native-Hawaiian students. We’ve developed fulfilling relationships with friends and colleagues while making progress in our careers.

Our beautiful daughter has become an articulate and quirky blonde three-and-a-half year-old, flourishing under the warm sun and palm trees. She’s attended two preschools here and has made plenty of friends, though she still usually prefers the company of her stuffed animals and her imagination. She gets excited when it’s “cold” enough to wear a jacket. To stay connected to family, she Skypes weekly with her grandparents and likes to send them long strings of emojis on Whatsapp. By Rory’s calculations, she’s been on nearly 30 airplanes in her short life.

Hawaii has been good to us. If you have enough money, it’s easy to live here. Throw out half of your wardrobe, buy a good pair of slippers (flip flops), and you’re basically set. It is undoubtedly the most beautiful place I will ever live in. I wake up to lush green mountains every morning and they still take my breath away. We’ve also had the chance to see three of the other Hawaiian islands besides O‘ahu -- Kauaʻi, Big Island, and Molokaʻi, and all of them have their own incredibly unique landscapes and flavors. Hawaii has provided us with amazing adventures and a home that is easy to love.

View of the windward side of Oahu while hiking.

Sadly, it was hard for us to visualize ourselves living in Hawaii long-term. We’ve been fortunate to live in subsidized university faculty housing, making our two bedroom apartment reasonably affordable. But as we approached the end of our allotted time there, the prospect of buying a house began to loom large. With average home prices in our neighborhood of nearly a million dollars, we had to consider the possibility of moving out to the suburbs, where houses are only slightly less absurdly expensive, and commute times are disheartening. We also began to think about the Hawaii education system as our daughter gets closer to kindergarten. Underfunded, low-quality public schools push people towards $22,000-per-year private schools, making Honolulu the second highest metro area in the nation in terms of private school enrollment. Being hugely in debt for the next 20-30 years was not what we were looking for.

Then there’s family. Rory and I have lived far from both of our families for the last eleven years. We are the only ones among our siblings who do not live within driving distance of our parents. Though we try to visit family at least once a year, the 30 hours of travel required to get to Scotland from Hawaii makes it a difficult journey. The eight hours to my parents’ house in Oregon feels like a quick hop by comparison. So as much as we loved Hawaii, in the back of our minds, we knew that if a good job came along near one of our families, we would seriously consider it.

That opportunity waltzed in our door last September. Rory was offered a permanent position at Newcastle University in the north of England, which is only a two-hour drive from his parents in Scotland. Given his narrow linguistic specialization, there are few professorships that Rory would qualify for in a given year, and hardly any in the UK. We didn’t expect to see such an opportunity to be close to family coming around again for a long time. So we jumped.

Before the movers arrived.

And now here we are, with three days left in Hawaii, frantically trying to pack, sell, and give away our belongings. We have had seven months to plan this move, and the complexities of it have been daunting. Spreadsheets and shared Google Docs have been our lifeline. I spent months (and more than $3500) working on getting a UK visa for myself, not knowing if I would receive it in time. We were given a £5000 allowance for moving expenses from Newcastle University, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that we’re moving 7,200 miles, or almost ⅓ of the way around the earth and our stuff has to cross two oceans and a continent. For a moving company to ship even a small fraction of our household belongings, with no furniture whatsoever, was going to cost at least $5000 and take two plus months to arrive. And of course, flights from Honolulu to the UK usually cost a minimum of $1000 per person and require somewhere north of 24 hours of travel time. This will be Rory’s fourth intercontinental move and my third, so we know the ropes, but the complexity of this one has been at times overwhelming.

Loading our stuff into the moving truck.

Then you add in a global pandemic. Things that we take for granted suddenly became nail biting uncertainties. Would the UK’s borders be shut? (No.) Would we have to self-quarantine upon arrival? (Possibly.) Would our flights be cancelled? (Yes.) Would the airlines still serve food? (Not sure.) Would we be able to find a hotel that wasn’t closed? (Yes, after our first booking was cancelled.) Fortunately, our friends and neighbors have been a great help, happily lending us things and buying our belongings from us (who would have thought that we’d be eager to see masked strangers coming to our door to take away our stuff?) Everyone is stressed out right now, everyone feels overwhelmed with uncertainty, but carrying out an intercontinental move during a global pandemic? My cortisol levels are through the roof.

Still, as I keep telling myself, we’ve nearly made it. The movers came last week and packed up our shipment. After today, all of our furniture will be gone. Tonight is our last night to sleep in our house and we fly out this Thursday. Things are going more or less according to plan. But there’s one other twist in this story.

I’m five months pregnant.