Travel and Healing During Covid

In March of 2020 the Australian government announced that we were going into lockdown, which they extended month after month with tighter and more challenging restrictions including home quarantine. At the worst point we were only able to leave the house for one hour a day and had to choose between exercise and groceries.

The helicopters hovered above the streets of our neighborhood looking for people out past the 9pm curfew. If your family lived out of the 5 km radius you no longer got to see them. Everything was different, especially the level of happiness we once knew.

Suicide rates were skyrocketing, domestic violence was on the rise and depression was the norm. I watched as my 14 year old stopped doing school work, came home late and wouldn’t talk to me. I watched her morph into someone I didn’t recognize anymore.  At one point she stopped coming home and I later discovered she was staying with people I couldn’t believe she even knew. People were leading her down a path of no return, a path of unhappiness and self destruction.

I myself was struggling with the extra cost of us schooling and working at home full time, a high workload and a recent breakup due to domestic violence. I felt a bit broken to be honest. I didn’t know if I had the emotional strength to help her anymore. My self loathing was at its peak and some days suicide didn’t seem like a crazy idea. This together with the huge debt the government had just sent me had me at my lowest point.

Then one weekend I heard that you could apply for an exception to leave the country, so I did, 7 times actually until they finally said yes. I have an English passport which helped my situation substantially. After selling everything I could, I quit my job, took some of my superannuation out and left with my daughter. I wasn’t going to sit by and watch her spiral even further down the black hole; one that I was worried I was falling into with her.

In October 2020 we boarded a flight from an empty Melbourne airport, straight to London. At this point my daughter wasn’t even sure she wanted to come. So to entice her I made a few promises I didn’t know if I could keep. ‘Yes sure we’ll go to Budapest’, ‘yeah no worries we’ll see the Eiffel tower’ and more. I just had to get her self-destructive attitude on the plane. 

We landed in London as the sun was rising and headed to my mates house, because every moment of this adventure to find happiness and ourselves was going to be based on how long the money would last. The crazy part is we had no plan, just to be happy and to respect each other again, but at this point I can honestly say we hated each other. 

I consider myself an experientialist and an existentialist, so the idea to ‘go somewhere’ really speaks to me. To make my own path, my own outcomes and be accountable. 

The first tears were on London Bridge, an ‘aha’ moment when she realized where we were, but London was going into lockdown too so I booked us a last minute flight to Greece. We had been in 6 months of winter when we got there and I recall the exact moment we plunged into the warm waters of the Aegean. I’d brought along my scuba goggles hoping to dive and Keeley donned them to look through the water at life on the bottom. As she surfaced she whipped off the goggles in awe of what she was seeing only to rip her nose ring out. The blood pouring down her face spread out around her. But she was so excited about what she was experiencing she said with jubilation,

“oh well it’s only a nose ring who really cares, I’m fine.” This was one of my first glimpses of my girl and I knew at that point I had a chance of her coming back to me and for us to just get on once again.

Over the next one and a half years we had highs and lows where I could see both of us struggling to find who we were, both as individuals and as mother and daughter. 

We hit Hong Kong, England, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, France and Sweden. But we didn’t just pass through these places, we absorbed them. We walked through deserted airports in Hong Kong where nothing was open and the stillness was palpable. Stayed with mates, sat in black cabs, marveled over the infamous London Tower, we caught boats to islands like Santorini and took IG photos, we gazed at Gaudi in Barcelona, swam the Mediterranean and rock climbed on the Costa Blanca, we slept on super yachts. We picked wild mushrooms in Hungary, explored the Jewish Quarter in Budapest, bought exquisite truffles in Serbia, sat on the yellow tram in Lisbon and ate Portuguese tarts. We were stunned by the beauty of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and got lost in Antalya. In France we got stranded on a night train when a meteorite hit, sat under the Eiffel tower, danced under the stars with thousands at the Fete de l’ Humanate. We learned to shoot in Sweden and ran along ocean tracks in the world’s cleanest air in Mali Losinj, Croatia. 

It wasn’t all fun and games, the bad days were terrible, we walked off on each other in busy places, we fought, we yelled, we emotionally bruised each other. But let me tell you, the good days changed who we were.

You’d think it was the moments that sound unbelievable that made the difference, like sleeping on a super yacht in Spain or staying with a French explorer in historic Tours or even soaking in the infamous thermal baths of Pamukkale. Hitchhiking on a sunny day around Hungary and drinking beetroot palinka with locals. Or the food, having a rug laid down for you in the street of Istanbul with homemade falafels and warm Turkish tea, steaming bowls of fresh spaghetti from a small intimate restaurant in London where the chef sits with you and tells you his story, being taught how to cook traditional soup in Croatia and tapas on the beach in Sitges, gazpacho in Seville, meatballs and mash with Lingonberries from the families forest in Sweden and snails in Paris. 

No, it wasn’t just these glorious moments, it was also the hard days, the crying, never being able to buy anything touristy or splash out like a normal tourist would, unconsciously becoming the ultimate minimalists, some days not having any accommodation for the night and sitting on a curb trying to work it out at 9pm. The ambiguity of our adventure and all the hard days also healed us and made us stronger and closer.

But don’t assume we traveled in style because as I said I am an experientialist and so am open to anything anywhere. And money was always on my mind. You must wonder how I paid for this, a single Mum of three, and even though I have always worked hard and had good jobs but the currency conversion for the Aussie dollar hurt so much. Europe is expensive.

So to keep the money lasting as long as possible we did house sitting, animals, plants, a super gerbil, whatever they needed. We did workaways which was hard but kept us fit and we made lifelong friends. We stayed with people I had met on my previous travels, with women in my Single Women Solo Travel group, couchsurfed, hostels, sleeper trains, airports, so we could save every cent. Once we were in a tent in -2 degrees where we had to cover ourselves with the clothes in our backpacks to make it through the night.

One of our most memorable was a van in Sweden with the stunning thick snow outside. The majority of the adventure we slept in the same bed, which at the start was incredibly challenging when you don’t even talk but towards the end waking up without Keeley giving soft little butterfly kisses on my forehead, well, I think you get it. In the end we preferred to sleep in a bed together so we can have mum and daughter cuddles each morning.

It’s hard for me to know when it all changed, when the paradigm shift occurred. Not one moment but many moments that led me to become a better mother, to love and respect myself and my choices and stand by them.

To see that I was the luckiest mother to have such an incredible daughter. To have so much love for myself and her and to know she felt the same.  That she now had the emotional intelligence of a much older and wiser woman and stood up for herself because she had self respect. Keeley had learnt to love herself and me.  

If you ask her, she will tell you that the day for her was when we had been not talking (again) on the tube in London. We stormed off and she said she looked back at my face and thought, Mum doesn’t want to fight. We turned to go out and there was a busker on the Waterloo line playing Viva La Vida, by Coldplay. We looked at each other and started to dance, we danced in front of other commuters walking past, some stopped to clap. We laughed and didn’t care and then we noticed the busker only had one arm and was playing that tune like he owned it, what a legend he was. I wish I could thank that man for giving us a memory no one can take away.

But, I wish I had a dollar for every person we met on this search that asked the same questions, ‘so is Keeley in school, how is she doing school, is she passing school, what about school?’ or ‘what do you do for a job, how do you afford this, are you working, what about your career?’

I wonder what the point of an education or career is if you hate yourself or you’re miserable.

Why is human progress based on economic growth and not levels of happiness? Why didn’t people ask if we were happy? Isn’t that more important? Why are the wrong questions asked? 

When you meet someone searching for something ask them, ‘are you happy?’ And really listen to their answer. 

So Keeley’s back in school with such self respect and confidence that she doesn’t need to hide behind someone she’s not. She has good people around her and can speak the basics of three languages. She knows more about culture, history and geography than most teenagers her age. She’s reading Sapiens: A brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari because her thirst for knowledge has been expanded by the people she met and the experiences of our journey together. 

And me?  Well, I’m happy, and I have my best friend and daughter and what’s more important than that?

So sell your ‘stuff’, quit that job you hate, tell the people you love how you feel, and get on a plane or a bus, or boat or just drive north,  ‘go somewhere’. 

Because you just never know how it might heal you and change your life for the better.