A quarantined journey

Sometimes you really do have to love technology. With the aid of video link, yesterday the children and I were able to share our walk along the lake foreshore with our friends in lock-down in their apartment in Chiba, Japan.

For someone who suffers debilitating motion sickness, living in Australia has often been a challenge, to travel. Even within our own country frequently people have to travel long distances for work or to visit family and friends. We tend to measure distance in time rather than kilometres. To travel to another country can involve a trek of several hours before we leave our shores.

During this pandemic I am grateful to live on such an isolated, big island, with a small population, which makes social distancing not as physically challenging as it is elsewhere in the world. While I worry about my friends scattered all over the world, I have to smile at the novel ways they are coping with this crisis wherever they are living.

On arriving home from our walk, I did ponder how we would fare if we had to stay inside. A glance at my library and the main bookcase had me thinking about the opportunity of sharing a quarantined journey around the world via some of the many souvenir’s family, friends and myself have collected over years of travel.

Each day I propose to showcase a different curio on Facebook/Instagram and leave it to you to create your own story. It seems only fitting to start the journey with an antique poison bottle marked as disinfectant.