This is our first trip since COVID-19. For our handful of loyal readers, you may recall our last trip to Argentina, where when we returned home the first week of February 2020, they were still only asking if you’d visited China.

A lot can happen in two and a half years. when COVID-19 let loose, I was 22 weeks pregnant with Oliver. With healthcare up in the air, I had fears that I wouldn’t have access to the hospital for my high-risk pregnancy. With our city in flames from protest, I wasn’t even sure I would have a safe route to the hospital to get care. Everything was in flux. Everything was in question.

Flash forward to May 2022, and not only did we make it through our pandemic pregnancy, but we had a second pandemic pregnancy which lead us to move from the city to the suburbs, uprooting everything we’d established in our 7 years in the city.

So now as we embark on our first vacation since COVID (not after COVID), I realize the greatest thing it stole from us was indeed the joy of travel – meeting new people, tasting different foods, learning new things, photographing new sights.

So here I am – ready to blog about our trip, which in some ways feels like a final victory in a 100 year war. In the saddle, guns a blazin’, our anthem in the background on repeat.

So I warn you ahead of time, unapologetically, that this trip is done deliberately in excess. With the goal of going somewhere new, exploring new experiences with our family, and really at the end of the day creating an experience that just might allow me to sleep in for the first time in 6 months, get lost in a good book, and for once get tipsy from a few too many fruity drinks. I think we’ve all earned it.

~Steph