100 Days in Lockdown, Time Flies Slowly!

Yes, today we have been in lockdown for 100 days due to Covid-19, having given ourselves a head start on the rest of the UK by self-isolating when we got back from Spain. We usually like to mark milestones with a blog post – 100 days on the road, 8 working hours to go to retirement number 3, 5 years of financial freedom, and, even though the world has gone all strange, we think this occasion shouldn’t be any different.

After hot-wheeling it across Europe from the bottom of Spain when the whole coronavirus thing kicked off (it wasn’t called a pandemic then) we were self-isolating for two weeks when the UK-wide lockdown began. Once our two weeks were up, we saw lockdown as relative freedom. We could go to the shops or exercise once a day. That didn’t last long though and soon the novelty wore off.

Since then we’ve experienced ups and downs like most folk, but in the current situation I think everyone is more aware of them. These days when we ask people ‘how are you doing?’, we mean it. No longer is it just a conversation pleasantry, and hopefully others feel the same and are able to reply truthfully.

We’ve been through the food lockdown cycle of concocting meals from what was in the cupboards due to shortages on the supermarket shelves, through baking or creating something new from scratch because we have the time, to not being bothered and back to our usual diets of oats or wheat biscuits for breakfast, salad for lunch and something from the freezer for tea.

We’re only doing our food shopping once a week, which can be a bit of a challenge with our under the counter fridge freezer (when we bought it we figured we’re walking distance from a supermarket and we’d let them keep everything cold or frozen for us and just nip to grab what we need, when we needed it), but we’ve managed of course. We’ve also supported our local restaurants by having take-away once a week from them, we can’t tell you how happy we were when the chippy at the end of our road reopened, we were in there on day one.

Running has helped to keep our fitness up, both physical and mental. As part of the committee for our local running club, we’re working each week to help create virtual events to keep us all motivated. It’s not easy though, and with nearly all races we had booked in cancelled, and those not yet cancelled looking pretty uncertain, it can be a real struggle to get your trainers on and out the door. Jay has switched from running long distances to trying to improve his speed, and I have just started a 12 week half-marathon training plan. The Robin Hood Half Marathon should be taking place here in Nottingham in September, and while it is out of my control if the race goes ahead or not, I can at least control my actions and following a plan will really help get fitter over the next three months. However it has taken me most of these 100 days to get my head thinking like that.

Our little bolt-hole in the UK, which we call The Cooler, has worked really well over our 100 days in lockdown. When we got back from Spain we were so relieved to be safe within its four walls, and hearing stories of full-timers trying to find safe havens reinforced to us that we had made the right decision to create and keep this place. However, being mainly open-plan and around 6m x 4m (a little over double the size of our van, and we have a small van compared to most) it can feel a little claustrophobic at times with both of us in here. When the weather is good, we spill out into our small yard which we share with the main house and shop. However, we have coped, and coped very well.

Jay recently celebrated his birthday, and we took the opportunity to head out into Derbyshire for some walking and an ice cream – while not my first of the year due to all the ones I scoffed in Spain, it was my first of the summer and a very much welcomed return to a bit more of normality . We were surprised at how busy places were, but I guess everyone else is fed up with staring at the same four walls.

But now, the time in lockdown seems to be dragging and the ‘new normal’ is here. It no longer feels strange to queue for shops, in fact I was taken aback when I arrived at one the other day and there was no queue. We wash our hands far more frequently than we ever have, although the singing along has now stopped. We have cautiously met up with our parents and best friends in their gardens, although not all at once. All the while trying to stay two metres away from all other beings, which still feels unnatural.

I have decided that the months are short in lockdown, but the days are long and 100 of them has been a very long time. Things are slowly changing and now there are no more nightly Government breifings, to be honest we stopped watching them a while back. From next Saturday we can go to the pub, but, most importantly for us motorhomers we can stay overnight elsewhere. Zagan is still SORNed at the moment, but we’ll get him taxed and hope we can find somewhere quiet for a few days away at some point for a change of scenery.

I think if we’d known at the start of all of this that we’d be facing 100 days in lockdown, we might have struggled mentally with the prospect, but with the Government broke it into three weekly chunks, so to me it didn’t seem so bad. The end of the briefings has left things up in the air now, and we have no idea how long we’ll have to continue to socially distance from our loved ones and only meet our friends in groups of six or less. Now the ‘new normal’ future seems to have no end in sight, which is hard on the head but we’ll continue to stick to the rules and hope we can hug our parents at some point soon.

We tried to start planning the rest of our lives the other day, after all we’ve had plenty of time for reflection, but we can’t decide anything at the moment. I don’t think that’s pandemic related, we’ve just always been rubbish at planning stuff. For now, we’re keeping ourselves safe and sane by doing what we do best – looking out for each other and doing what we enjoy. We didn’t have any set plans for travel for the back half of 2020, and right now I’m enjoying being at home, so we’re thinking we’ll stay in the UK for the rest of this year and maybe explore some places in Zagan that are a bit closer to home.

Ju x