2020 - A Year In Review
Happy new year everyone! What a roller coaster ride in 2020.
We wanted to say we made a bigger leap with our family travel this year, but we all know the reality.
Nevertheless we have spent 6 months in Airbnbs for this year. Can you believe? Yes that’s a total of 180 days!
We started January in Hawaii. Together with our Hawaii time in the end of 2019, we spent almost 6 weeks there.
Two big milestones: Apollo turned five; Orion got potty trained.
If you followed our cross country road trip in the end of 2019, we moved westward with the plan to fly to China after Hawaii. We were supposed to fly just before Chinese New Year, 3 days after China started lockdown.
On the last day of January, I flew with two kids to San Francisco instead, with the hope to still make the trip to China. Nobody knew how severe the situation was back then. In the meantime, my husband picked up our car parked in Las Vegas before we flew to Hawaii, and did a solo cross country drive to Rhode Island.
I came to San Francisco for the first time 20 years ago as a tourist. It was love at first sight! I came back the second time as a resident, and have since stayed for 10 years. (See my landscape photo gallery of San Francisco so you know how much I loved this city)
We moved out of San Francisco 4 years ago when Apollo was still crawling, and out of the Bay Area 2 years ago when Orion was still a newborn. This unplanned trip made total sense to help me reintroduce our little ones to their hometown.
For the first week, we experienced many "first times" - Children's Creative Museum, California Academy of Science, Carousel at Yerba Buena Garden, taking the Caltrain together etc.
I was reliving my tourist life in San Francisco, my second hometown, after 20 years, feeling a combination of freshness and nostalgia.
We visited some of my best friends, and enjoyed plenty of play dates, something our 5 year old longed for.
As the pandemic unfolded, we joined my husband in Newport, Rhode Island, and ended up staying there for 3 months, with a small weekend trip to Boston. (Check out 3 Months In Rhode Island, What Did We See?)
We did our cross country move again in the end of May. My husband had to drive our car across the country, while I flew with two kids alone.
Our flight destination was Portland, Oregon. We had a 2 hour taxi ride to Boston, followed by a 6-hour flight to Seattle, and 2-hour layover, and another short flight to Portland.
We left super early in the morning. In the middle of chaos, I forgot our travel stroller at the Airbnb in Rhode Island.
It was a bit nerve wracking to discipline two young kids in the airport, as they literally touched everything while our 2 year old refused to wear a mask. We decided to ditch our layover in Seattle, had my husband drive us down to Portland instead. Luckily, everyone was healthy.
As it turned out, we spent our entire June in our Portland Airbnb, wearing PJs.
There were curfews every day due to the Black Life Matters movement. Together with Covid, it seemed everything was locked down.
Our original plan to move back to California after our South America trip in 2019 had so many twists and turns. Up to this point, we didn’t know which version of our plan was still worth following.
So, we did a 2-day road trip, up to the Olympic National Park in Washington. Believe it or not, it cemented our decision to move there.
In the middle of July, we bought a house in a tiny town outside of Olympic National Park, after seeing less than 10 properties. Could you sense our desperation, to settle down?
Ironically, after getting married and having kids for so many years, we never figured out if or where we wanted to settle down, and have been dancing with the possibility to become a part or full-time travel family. Apparently, the pandemic helped us make a decision, on a supersonic fast track.
For the second half of 2020, yes you guessed it right. No more airbnbs or hotels, we were settled solid.
We have waited for a whole month in an empty house, except for a table, a few chairs and several air mattresses, before our household was shipped from the east coast near the end of August. We packed everything in August 2019 before our 9-week South America trip (check out 28 blogs I wrote about this trip), and didn’t expect this move to take a whole year. The unpacking took forever.
I spent a good amount of time upgrading cookware and cooking skills. Our taste buds were quickly satisfied. On the flip side, we quickly gained weight as well.
Olympic National Park became our staycation destination. We made 2-3 dozens of day trips there throughout the summer, fall and winter. We couldn’t be luckier to spend the pandemic in the beautiful nature.
I had quite an ambition to renovate the house, and even did all the landscaping and interior drawings. Nothing panned out for all kinds of reasons.
If there’s something exciting, I upgraded my camera gear - quite massively!
I bought:
a Canon EOS R5 camera
a Canon RF24-70mm f2.8 lens
a Canon RF70-200mm f2.8 telephoto lens
as well as accessories, eg. CF Express Card (the memory card specifically for the R5) memory card reader, and L-bracket etc.
This wrapped up my one camera one lens setup since 2018. See how I decided the right camera for me and my gear list).
Thank you 2020. If I have to tell stories of the most eventful or uneventful year in my life, this must be it.
Like everyone else, we have learned to grow strong, resilient, flexible and most importantly, patient.
So long 2020. 2021 will sure be better!
Check out our 2019 - A Year In Review.
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We took our first camping trip as a family to the Pacific coast in Washington, featuring our favorite photo spots of the Olympic National Park along the Pacific Ocean.