Moving in the middle of a pandemic

One of the fundamental messages of the last year has been to stay at home, but sometimes that’s not possible. Whether you are heading back to your home base for a while or heading onto your next expat placement sometimes moving is non-negotiable.

Here are some of the tips we’ve learnt recently going through the process!

1) Set up a google alert for information on the quarantine requirements at your next end. These can change on a second’s notice and you can drive yourself a bit crazy trying to keep up with it. A google alert means you’ll never miss any changes and can change your plans.

2) Don’t read the comments on any of the news article about quarantine requirements. While we are all ideally staying at home, life moves in unexpected ways. The comments sections are full of people who don’t know your life and who tend to be very passionate about people not travelling at all.

3) Streamline those moving plans. We found that most of the home opens in our new base (Canada) were doing virtual home opens rather than face to face home opens, so we decided to find a home virtually and move straight in with rental furniture. It saved us the stress of moving round in a pandemic and has made quarantine much more comfortable.

4) Bring spare masks. Every where you go. When you go on long haul flights no matter how well you plan, someone will lose or break their mask. Change masks out every 4 hours and have some extras because you don’t want to get caught short when your child loses their mask somewhere critical.

5) Keep plans flexible. It’s a crazy time to try and move countries and things will go wrong. We had our flights cancelled the week before we left, which was stressful. But we quickly rebooked and we got here as planned.

No matter what happens, there is usually a way through any of the issues you might face moving in a pandemic.