From house cats to wild penguins.

I’ve been housebound (apartmentbound?) for nearly two weeks now. It started with a tendinitis flare-up which coincided with some shitty weather that made it unpleasant to go out for a mood-lifting walk. After a week of keeping my right wrist in a brace and taking anti-inflammatories, I started to develop a cough, resulting in an overlap of sickness and injury. At the same time, the weather improved, but I’ve been too sick to go outside.

You know who really understands what it’s like to be trapped inside? These two:

Having the cats around have kept me from turning into a triple threat: sick, injured, AND depressed.

The upside of getting sick while recovering from an injury is that I already had a doctor’s note excusing me from work. But because I had spent all my paid sick days back in June to recover from my bike accident, I’ve earned $0 over the past two weeks. To put it in context, THAT’S NOTHING.

Tomorrow, I start earning money again. I really need it as I have booked a two-week vacation at the end of January.

My friend Mélissa and I are going to… Réunion Island.

 

Not in 2019, anyway. Mélissa was initially excited about Réunion as our destination but soon learned that it’s cyclone season for 6 months of the year, including January. “I don’t want to go if there’s a good chance it’ll be wet for most of the time.” I take it she didn’t get as far as learning that Réunion is the highest risk place for shark attacks.

So, we will be going to… Brazil.

Nope, not here either. Too much crime and they just elected the Brazilian equivalent of Trump.

The above photo is of Fernando de Noronha, a volcanic archipelago 300km off the coast of Brazil. While this island is much safer than mainland Brazil, it’s also much more expensive. To balance out the cost of staying on Fernando de Noronha, Mélissa and I were considering spending some time in Recife, but the price and availability of flights was also an issue. Spending our full two weeks on this archipelago didn’t seem reasonable.

So, we will be going to… Argentina.

Final answer.

More specifically, we’re headed to Patagonia.

Booking our flights wasn’t an easy feat, and we nearly ruled out this destination too until we figured our best bet was to fly out of New York’s JFK airport. When we realized there were multiple daily flights between Montréal and New York, we stopped searching for flights to these small cities in Patagonia out of Montréal and instead focused on JFK as our departure airport.

It’s still going to take a very long time to reach Patagonia, and it will still be a pricey vacation.

Of all my travels, the destination that took the longest to arrive at was Sydney, Australia, but that was just one direct flight approx. 16 hours. However, this trip also had me fly from Sydney to Brisbane then from Brisbane to Cairns. (A lot of people don’t realize just how big Australia is.) From Cairns, I took a tour shuttle to Cape Tribulation. After playing  with large spiders in the jungle, a Greyhound bus brought me back south to Airlie Beach for a three-day sailboat trip around the Whitsunday Islands. To get back to Sydney, I had to take a ferry from Airlie Beach to a small airport on Hamilton Island. This was in 2013.

Imagine doing that amount of transfers in the span of two weeks instead of an entire month? That’s what our Patagonia itinerary looks like. I can’t believe Mélissa and I only have five weeks to plan this!

What has been your most complicated travelling destination? Was it worth it?