My 2020 Covid-19 Year in Review

2020 was set to be an epic year for me. Epic for travel, for work and income, for great family gatherings…

My 2020 World Travel Plan

In terms of travel, I was planning to visit 10-11 countries, most of them new to me. I started the year in Cyprus, spending January hiking the island nation’s rugged & beautiful coastlines, cliffs and beaches.

In early February I headed to Istanbul, Turkey, where I spent one month and then planned to spend another two months exploring the vast country of Turkey before heading back to the Balkan Peninsula and eastern Europe.

I actually had the entire year mapped out rather precisely. Turkey in Feb-April. Croatia in May & June. Bosnia and Serbia in July. A brief stop in Sofia, Bulgaria to retrieve a suitcase I’d left there in December and catch a flight to Poland. August and September would find me exploring Poland. In October I would dash through Austria, Check Republic and Slovenia (and possibly Luxemburg).

In late October I planned to return to the USA in order to vote in the Presidential election on Nov. 3^rd.Then I would spend the holidays with family in Florida.

That itinerary would have nicely advanced my ongoing goal to visit every country in the world. I could have explored another eight new countries and re-visit three.

2020 Work Assignments

At the end of 2019 my boss offered me a massive work assignment for 2020 that included reviewing close to 200 luxury & boutique hotels in more than a dozen countries and updating about 20 country & city travel guides.

In fact, the proffered assignment was so huge that, upon careful consideration, I had to turn down a good chunk of it. I knew it would be impossible to complete it all in one year. And I consider myself very responsible for only ever taking on as much as I know I can handle.

In recent years, a normal year’s worth of assignments usually included 80-100 hotel reviews in six to eight countries and perhaps 2-5 guide updates. And that amount of work was just about all I could complete in one year’s time.

The 2020 offer was nearly double that.

After carefully calculating how much time I’d need to visit all those hotels and then write up all the reviews; how much time I’d further need to research and update the proffered country & city guides, I realized it would literally be impossible.

staying at Finca Rosa Blanca Resort in Costa Rica

On top of that, I am actually traveling the world first and foremost to explore nature, culture, cities and towns. To enjoy the world. Not just to spend all my waking hours working.

In the end, I declined reviewing 45 hotels in Austria, along with a country guide update, and a few much smaller country assignments.

My final accepted 2020 work assignment included reviewing 150 hotels in 8-9 countries (depending on whether or not I made it to Luxemburg) and 12-14 country & city guides. This included getting to finally review hotels in St Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, an assignment I’d been requesting for four years.

Besides getting to visit so many stunning luxury & boutique hotels, I’d also be making more money than I had in all my years of world travel. In fact, I’d be making more than I had since I worked in Japan in the 1990s.

I’d make so much money, in fact, that I’d have enough to live on for the first 3-4 months of 2021! Maybe I could even travel to a few (expensive) Caribbean islands that were so close and easy to reach from Florida.

2020 Family Gatherings

In 2019, while I was traveling around Macedonia, I found out about a big family reunion being held in Poland in September. These were my Polish relatives on my mother’s side, all of whom I’d never met before. I found out about the reunion from my American aunt & uncle, who were going to attend.

It didn’t take me long to decide to divert my travel plans to fly up to Poland, join the reunion, then continue my intended travels in reverse direction. After all, I was pretty darn close to Poland in global terms.

The 3-day reunion proved to be great fun. And before the weekend event had concluded, I’d pretty much convinced my mom and brother to go join the next family reunion in September, 2020. (I made a couple video calls to mom and to my brother during the reunion so they could see for themselves the great fun)

So in September, 2020 I was greatly looking forward to meeting up with my mom and brother in southern Poland, at a beautiful mountain resort town, to join in my second Polish family reunion.

And then in late October, I’d fly to Florida, as previously mentioned, to stay with my mom & stepdad for about three months. I’d get to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s with them and my brother & sister-in-law in beautiful Florida. Woo-hoo!

On all counts, 2020 was set to be a super epic year.

And then, of course, Covid-19 hit.

My Actual 2020 Year of Work & Travel

As I mentioned, I started the year out as planned in Cyprus and then Istanbul, Turkey. At that point nobody – in the western world – had even heard about the new corona virus yet.

While I was in Istanbul in February, we started getting whisperings of a new dangerous virus in China. At that point I wasn’t at all concerned. In recent years there had been many regional viral outbreaks – Bird Flu, Swine Flu, SARS, MARS, Ebola. They had all been contained pretty quickly and remained mostly regional. And China was a long way from Turkey.

But in late February or early March the virus hit neighboring Iran and quickly began killing people at an alarming rate. Soon after, neighboring Italy suffered the same fate.

At that point I began getting concerned. Iran and Italy were both very very close to Turkey. And Istanbul is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

I started looking around me at all the swarms of people. Crowded sidewalks, jammed trams & buses, large bus-loads of Chinese tourists. And I thought to myself, “Surely, this virus must be here in Istanbul already.”

In addition, I was busy visiting one luxury hotel after another on a daily basis. I considered that to be rather risky business with a contagious virus circulating.

Hot Air Ballooining in Cappadocia – photo by Saad Sarfraz Sheikh on Flickr CC

Luckily for me, that was near the end of my one-month stay in Istanbul. In early March I already had a flight booked out of there to Cappadocia, in the center of Turkey.

Just one day before my flight, my apartment host, a Turkish journalist, told me they’d found the first case of the virus in Istanbul! Yikes! I was outa there.

It was during my 10 days in Cappadocia in mid-March that governments around the world, including Turkey, started taking measures to avoid the spread of the virus. Over the week I watched Goreme town slowly empty out until it was a ghost town.

Quite luckily, I had just taken my amazing hot air balloon ride, as well as a great regional tour of Cappadocia. Soon after that I took a bus to Konya city and then on to Antalya.

One week after I arrived in Antalya, on Turkey’s stunning Mediterranean coast, Turkey’s strict lockdowns began. I was ‘stranded’ in Antalya.

That proved to be absolutely wonderful, as I detailed in this article. Turkey was under a ‘loose’ lockdown, which meant I could go outside to walk for 2-3 hours in Antalya’s gorgeous parks, beautiful old historic district and along the dramatic cliffside coast.

Coastline and Konyaalti Beach in Antalya

I also obtained a bicycle, so I cycled out into the gorgeous mountains 2-3 times a week.

Meanwhile, as the virus was dubbed ‘covid-19’ and declared a global pandemic, lockdowns tightened around the world, and millions of people began losing their jobs and closing small companies.

It started dawning on me that this virus could also affect my own job. So I wasn’t surprised in mid April when my boss sent me a regret-filled email explaining that the company had to indefinitely suspend all further work assignments for 2020 until further notice. Ugh.

However, all assignments currently in progress were allowed to be completed. That was fantastic news for me since I had such a big assignment in Turkey. In fact, that assignment took me until July to fully complete.

Meanwhile, in June, domestic travel restrictions in Turkey were lifted and I cautiously traveled along the beautiful coast to Fetiye and beyond. But I loved Fetiye so much that I stayed another two months there.

I kept in touch with my boss about potential 2020 assignments being renewed. As Europe began opening borders to some travelers, my boss announced that she still had a budget for my original huge Croatia assignment.

quaint historic Hvar town

Lo and behold, much to my amazement, Croatia – alone out of all EU countries, and in defiance of EU guidelines – opened their borders to ALL tourists, including Americans and Brits.

I waited until after the summer tourist season to head to Croatia. In mid-September I finally left Turkey, seven months after arriving and four months OVER on my 90-day tourist visa. Ooppss.

I flew to Zagreb, Croatia without incident and began my work and explorations of that beautiful coastal country, set along the clear Adriatic Sea. I planned on spending two months there, but ended up staying for my full visa term of 90 days.

Then I headed to neighboring Bosnia & Herzegovina in December to finish out the year. Luckily, I was also given a small hotel & guide update assignment for Bosnia.

The large assignments in Turkey & Croatia and smaller assignments in Cyprus and Bosnia got me financially through the entire year. Along with my US stimulus check, which actually was my father’s stimulus check. He gave me his since I never got mine. And that got me through all of 2020. Thanks dad!

Summary of my 2020 Covid-19 Year

I consider myself to have had an extremely lucky year in 2020, and that’s on all counts.

Financially, I had enough work & gained enough income to see me through the entire year. Disappointingly, I missed out on what was slated to be my biggest income year in more than two decades. Yes, that’s a bummer.

But considering how many millions of people lost their jobs or had to close their businesses, I consider myself very very fortunate.

Travel-wise, yes, I did miss out on exploring several new countries. However, I did get to visit four new countries in the end, which is certainly better than zero.

Even better, I absolutely loved being ‘stuck’ in Antalya and Fetiye for four months. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and do not regret a minute of it. In fact, I can even say that I’m quite glad I was ‘forced to’ stay in there so long. I would not have missed a lot had I whisked through on my originally-planned exploration of the coast.

Had I visited Croatia without my big work assignment, and in a normal year, I would have only stayed two weeks and only visited Dubrovnik and Split. So I was extremely lucky to spend three weeks in beautiful Dubrovnik, a month in gorgeous Split and another month at wonderful Hvar Island.

It was really the two planned family gatherings that completely went out the window for me in 2020. It is disappointing that the great annual Polish family reunion was cancelled.

But it’s more regrettable for me that I didn’t get to return ‘home’ for Christmas and New Year’s. It’s been two years since my last US visit, so I was greatly looking forward to that.

hiking through Saklikent Gorge solo in early morning!

As for the extremely important US Presidential Election, I was easily able to vote from overseas, sending in my completed ballot by fax from Croatia.

Hopefully I’ll be able to return to Florida in late 2021 to take up the Christmas holidays with family, just one year later than planned.

Let’s all hope 2021 sees the world get Covid-19 under control, vaccines administered on a mass scale, and the world return to a normal-ish place again. I hope to be traveling again by mid 2021. Let’s see!

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You might also like:

An Ideal Life in the Covid-19 World

What it’s like Traveling during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Update on Staying Safe while Traveling During Covid-19

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