Coronavirus is running rampant outside the walls of my apartment and I'm having to stay home from work for the next several days as they try to limit how many people are in one room at one time. All the gyms and swimming pools are closed, causing me to find different ways to keep in shape. In over three years, the longest I've gone without swimming was 10 days...and the Sindelfingen and Maichingen pools aren't reopening until the first of May! It also goes without saying that I'm not getting on a plane or intercity train anytime soon. Ski resorts have all shut down early, cutting my planned snowboard season a month short...Tomorrowland Winter was understandably cancelled, I didn't have a ticket to go anyway but it was still shocking news...right now I'm a little wary of registering for anything--music festival, obstacle race, marathon, whatever--happening before the end of summer. Small price to pay, though, for halting the spread of a pandemic.
While I may be used to living alone, I'm also used to not being home all day every day. Maybe now I can finally catch up with all the movies and TV series everyone but me has seen. I just finally watched "The Irishman" last Sunday in fact. This apartment seriously needs cleaning, so does my car...oh yeah and there's a bunch of travelogues I was going to finish!
In the next couple of days I should start getting the long-overdue blogs about my 2016 Montréal trip up here, followed by the Toronto and Mérida, México trips I took a year later. These won't be quite as detailed as the more recent travelogues I've already published; after all, these trips happened a few years ago and a lot of minor details have slipped my mind. Even now when I read the stuff I wrote here about backpacking or Tomorrowland I can point at little bits and say "I don't remember that...or that...or that..." because everything was so fresh in my mind when I started writing. Even so, I did start banging out the notes for these old trips and even writing some of the paragraphs not too long after the trips ended, so it's not like I'm starting from scratch.
Finally, friends, stay safe out there. The threat is real.
