It was the second half of February and 4 months since I returned home from my 2019 Europe-Asia-Europe trip. The weather in Colorado was snowy with temperatures below freezing, the kind that makes me to hole up at home because I am a cold blooded creature and need warmth to survive. My job as a translator/interpreter kept me going but it felt like the time for a change of scenery, at least for a few days. I brought up this subject to my husband, Sergey.
‘Let’s go to some place warm, say, Cuba’, that was the destination that I dreamed of visiting for years.
‘Americans cannot visit Cuba as tourists. You know that,’ he said.
‘We can go there with our Russian passports.’
‘Too complicated to arrange that and too risky. No, we are not going to Cuba.’
The conversation was over, although I could not understand what was complicated and risky about traveling to Cuba as Russians.
However, the idea of a short vacation caught on with Sergey. In the evening of the same day, he checked airfare prices and found reasonably cheap tickets to Colombia, the country that both of us never visited before.
The cheapest tickets were for March, 6 which was in less than 3 weeks. I did not mind to replace Cuba with Colombia and confirmed my approval. Now, it was up to my husband to make the decision if we were going or not. Sergey contemplated the trip idea while I kept away from him watching TV on a different level of the house and pretending that I did not care.
At last, the tickets were purchased and even the hotel was booked. All that happened within hours. My husband sat down on the couch amazed by his own spontaneity. It was not like him at all. Normally, he plans a trip months or years in advance carefully crafting the itinerary. This time, we were going to Colombia at the drop of a hat.
The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was already raging in China and South Korea. It became a serious issue in Italy, but there were no known cases of the virus in South America. The WHO had not yet categorized the virus spread as a pandemic. We thought we had time to make this trip.
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