We’re in a holding pattern

Wow! How the world has changed in the last two weeks since the last update! And unfortunately the vast majority of the change has not been for the better.

The Cayman government has been very proactive. Schools were immediately closed and cruise ships were not allowed to dock. This has been followed by shutting the airport, asking people to work from home and banning gatherings to an evening curfew (which will run for 2 weeks) to a 2 1/2 day lock-down. The lock-down eases tomorrow and we will have a 10-day ‘shelter at home’ order (soft curfew).

This hammer approach appears to have worked and we have one potential local transmission of Covid-19.

The motorhome is scheduled to be built in Germany and collected from a dealership in France. Plus to fly to Paris we need to transit through the US.

So it is looking like the trip’s commencement date will be delayed. Given how fluid the situation is and how quickly things change, we are not thinking about when we will start the trip. Luckily the trip will be long enough that a few months delay isn’t the end of the world. Image if we had only decided to travel for a year.

Flightfeeder tracking
Drop in number of planes spotted is remarkable

In the attic I have a FlightFeeder , a device that listens for radio signals from ADS-B aircraft transponders and decodes them to determine aircraft positions. The global airline shutdown can be seen here in the Caribbean. The FlightFeeder recorded 439 aircraft on Saturday, 14 March (Saturdays typically record the most aircraft) to a low of 71 aircraft today! Cayman shut its airport on Sunday, 15 March, and other countries in the Caribbean and Central America shut their airports over the next week.

Let’s do our part to help the world and flatten the curve before we worry about travelling.

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