Travel in the time of COIV D
By Mark Anderson
Finding your own fun Last year Mark Anderson wrote a popular article on local and international travel by caravan and motorhome. Many readers asked for more information on how to plan safe travel during COVID-19 restrictions.
C
aravanning and motorhoming is not for everyone, but since our article last year, the COVID19 pandemic has dramatically changed the world of travel. We have had to turn our gaze inwards for holidays within Australia’s national, and sometimes due to lockdowns, our home state borders. However, given the natural wonders that our country has to offer, restrictions on overseas holidays seems a fair trade for the relative freedom we have achieved, whilst other countries have been locked down for months at a time.
The best that Australia has to offer is often found in quite remote locations without much in the way of facilities nearby, so we have always been a nation of campers and caravanners, but never more so than this year! An awful lot of dollars normally spent by households on international trips have been switched to purchases of a caravan, motorhome,
camper trailer, or just some basic camping equipment. It’s been a boom year for the industry, and with many recreational vehicles being manufactured within Australia, that’s been good news for our economy. But is it really safe to travel around like this during the pandemic? Given our slow vaccine roll out, and the morphing of this virus, we are either going to have to learn to travel safely or accept that even domestic holidays will be off the cards for a while yet. In this article we want to share some thoughts from our experiences on the challenges and opportunities for caravan and camping holidaying in Australia during these often challenging times. My wife Catherine and I have spent twelve months out of the last eighteen travelling in both a motorhome and a caravan during this pandemic. In 2020 we spent six months travelling around England and Wales in
our little camping van, managing to stay virus free and still had a wonderful time. Then we came back to Australia, where we have now been on the road in our caravan since December. Our friends in Australia thought we were quite mad not going back into our house that we own (but rent out) in Sydney, but we felt confident from our UK experience that we were forewarned and forearmed, and from our previous trips around Australia in 2018 and 2019, that we could travel in a way that was not creating more of risk to others or ourselves than staying in Sydney. Aren’t we concerned about travelling when this virus can regularly break out into the community? Our personal view (and this is not professional health advice!), we are comfortable managing the risk of infection given our high level of self-sufficiency in a caravan
Photography courtesy of www.whenthecatsaway.net
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September 2021
Integrity – Loyalty – Respect Freemason
