The last trip before lockdown - Istanbul
The last trip before Covid lockdown
I actually flew to Istanbul to jump on a flight to Saudi Arabia, but that got cancelled whilst I was in Istanbul, along with the flights to Lebanon and Azerbaijan I also had booked.
Istanbul was dead because everybody was stuck in their homes.
I returned to Istanbul about 6 months later with Tanya and enjoyed it there.
This was the start of the world going crazy, nobody knowing how to deal with simple things, but also sparked mine and Tanya's full time travel idea. We had no intention of doing it before. She has worked remotely for years, but I worked in an office and enjoyed it - I worked with my mates, rather than in some crap bullpen type shit place of work.
The company was forced to send people home, and during working at home I decided that travelling would be a good idea when places start to open. Tanya agreed.
We initially planned on spending a month in Georgia, but that again got cancelled pretty much right after we booked it. Their government couldn't decide what to do.
After travelling for a few weeks, we decided we'll just continue until we don't want to anymore. The problem was, we were completely unprepared, we just had simple things in our bag and had to constantly reconfigure our backpacks to be comfortable.
As I'm writing this, the second year is coming to an end and I think we've got our backpacks about 95% correct - with the last 5% still in my head - just need to buy the last few things.