31 December 2019 to 2 December 2020, COVID-19

A pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China on 31 December 2019.

The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020.

On 11 February 2020, WHO announced a name for the new coronavirus disease: COVID-19.

We travelled by car to Melbourne Victoria on 26 February and returned home on 3 March 2020.  You could say that “it hit the fan” whilst we were away with Australia coming to realise the magnitude of the virus and what would be required to make the country safe.

Our plans to attend the “Stone the Crows” festival at Wagga Wagga at Easter were cancelled with restrictions being placed on the number of people who could congregate as a group.  Our trip to the ACC Chairman’s Muster in May at Charters Towers in Queensland was also cancelled for the same reason notwithstanding the fact  that the Queensland Government closed the state borders and banned interstate travel.  The Queensland trip included our involvement in tagalongs to and from the event.

When will we next travel, who knows?  We think that the ACC will have to cancel the 2020 National Muster (Edit: has been cancelled and rescheduled at the same venue next year) that was planned to be held in Rockhampton simply because of the fact that there is a lot of planning required and at the time of writing this entry, the is no firm indication of what the situation will be at that time.  We are still hopeful that our ACC branch will be able to hold our Christmas muster that is scheduled to be held in Berry NSW in late November.  We had not planned to attend that event having booked a trip to Singapore and a cruise home.  Time will only tell if that will happen but right now, it appears that there will be no overseas travel from Australia this year.  The only exception might be New Zealand where we have a trip planned in September.  Again, only time will tell.

Update – 2 December 2020

We are now home from our first outing in the caravan since December 2019.  We did have a trip to the Hunter Valley in September but that was by car and we did take the caravan from a service to Emu Plains NSW in November.  Things are starting to return to some degree of normality but travel outside of Australia is probably a year away at the earliest.  Provided that the spread of transmission of COVID-19 in Australia can be managed, local travel will be the way to go.

Shortly I will post details of our trip over the past couple of weeks.

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