After our Townsville trip, in the March/April time frame, the vaccine rollout in the US seemed really promising and the vaccine rollout in Australia was just the opposite. Though Australia has done an amazing job keeping covid out of the country, they are in no “rush” to vaccinate people which is disheartening to me and many other people who have a wide variety of reasons for wanting to actually be able to leave the country and return without getting permission to leave, currently required for all citizens and permanent residents, and paying thousands of dollars for 14 days of hotel quarantine on return, also required, assuming you can even return given that arrival numbers are severely limited. Anyway, I’ll stop my rant before I get too riled up. Thus, our options looked to be staying in Australia until early 2022 if we wanted to get vaccinated here and then travel back OR travel back sooner with the idea that we’ll get vaccinated the day after we arrive. The latter was the best choice for us and we were able to get approval to leave since we plan to be gone for more than 3 months.

With lots of house sitting experience under our belts, to rave reviews I must add, we turned our attention to finding a longer house sit to allow us to transition out of our apartment and then travel back to the US. Jon found just the ticket in a Brisbane suburb, nearly 5 weeks with just 1 dog. A super cute old doggo, Honey. We started selling or donating everything we didn’t have to have as quickly as possible and, once we moved out on April 13th, put the rest on sale. We had a lot of difficulty getting rid of the last few large items, but Jon got them all taken care of one way or another. It involved numerous drives back and forth at an hour round trip to do so, and I am very grateful to him. Jon also found us a top rate rental agent who found us renters as soon as we put the apartment up for rent. They moved in on May 1st and so far things seem to be going well or at least we haven’t heard otherwise!

At some point earlier in the year, Jon committed to doing another house sit at the house we first sat so we knew we needed to be here to do that and through magical luck the nearly 5 week house sit finished just as this one started. Now we’re back with Nelson and Kelsey and all the birds for a week. Once we finish here, we’ll head down to Sydney over a few days, get our required covid test within 72 hours of departure, and hopefully depart on our first flight since January 2020 on May 27th. We loaded up on N95 equivalent masks, hand sanitizer and wipes and booked appointments for our first Pfizer shot the next morning.

We’ll be laying low at my mom’s house until we’re fully vaccinated and then getting out and about to see everyone we’ve been missing so much over the past 1.5 years. We’re going to miss lots of people and things in Australia, but we’re super excited to get back to the US for a good long while.