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Well, 2020 is certainly go down in history as a very strange year. How often in history does one thing affect everyone in the world at the same time?
The travel industry has been especially hard hit. Who is flying unless they really need to? First, you’d be lucky to find a flight as many have been cancelled. Second, if you do find a flight chances are it would be cancelled before your departure date if the airline didn’t feel they had enough people on board to make it worth their while. When you finally arrived at the airport you’d find the whole experience of dealing with airports, gates, boarding and on-flight etiquette rather challenging because of Covid. And then if and when you finally arrived at your destination there’s a good chance you may have to go into quarantine for two weeks. Or, if they don’t get you at your destination, they might on the return trip.
So, after trying air travel and not enjoying the experience, we decided we’d just drive this year and avoid crowded places. Which meant places close to Lisbon, where we chose to ride out the Covid storm.
Our first trip was south into the Algarve. It turned out to be a great place to go for a trial run on how to adapt to traveling during the time of a pandemic. The next trip took us up into Northern Portugal, an area we had not seen before and ended up enjoying immensely. We rented a home out in the middle of nowhere, far from everyone, and enjoyed biking, boarding and just letting the world go by as we disconnected ourselves.
But in the late summer, now more adventurous, we decided to drive up to the island of Noirmoutier, an island off the coast of Northwestern France where we’ve been spending the better part of our summers for more than twenty years.
The trip is nearly 2,000 km, one way. Easy enough for a Canadian who’s used to traveling long distances to get anywhere back in Canada, but not for Florence, who just doesn’t like being stuck in a car for long periods of time. So I made the drive up by myself and she flew into Nantes, France where we met up.
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