What a month! On the face of it, life in quarantine just keeps continuing on rather monotonously, but scratch just a little bit beneath the surface, and it’s a giant juggle of moving parts!
When we left off last month, I shared that our planned trip to New England for this spring had been cancelled, but at the time of writing, we still didn’t have a solid plan for what we were going to do instead. So, let’s start our stories there…
Originally, we were going to be leaving Santa Fe, New Mexico at the end of April, but when Covid-19 hit in mid-March, we soon realized that our planned flight back to New England for 6 weeks wasn’t going to happen. The challenge was: could we just stay here in our current condo in Santa Fe or not… and if not, then what would we do. So, here’s what ended up happening…
Our Santa Fe Relocation
I’ve written in the past about travel planning horizons, and our preferred travel planning horizon definitely came into play here. Brian and I both prefer to plan WAY ahead regarding decisions like destinations and accommodations, so suddenly having this 6+ week gap in our plans due to cancelling the New England trip meant we needed to think creatively and consider our options.
After several conversations, we essentially realized that there were roughly four reasonable options:
- Stay in Santa Fe in our current condo – This option was our first choice, but entirely contingent on whether the other bookings for our current place during that 6 week period of time would cancel.
- Stay in Santa Fe, but find a different home – This option was our second choice since it would allow us to keep our childcare arrangements and continue to “shelter-in-place” just in a different house through what we hope will be the remainder of the Coronavirus pandemic. Doing our part to help #FlattenTheCurve.
- Relocate early to Portland, Oregon (our next planned long stay) – This option depended on whether our Portland host’s other bookings during May/June cleared out. This was a less preferable option because we would likely need to self-quarantine upon arrival in Portland for at least 2 weeks, and finding childcare in a new city in the middle of the pandemic seemed unlikely (hahaha… more about that topic later.)
- Find a different place somewhere else to fill in the gap – We considered going back to Cottonwood, AZ and got in touch with our former host there in case her schedule cleared out because that’s only 1-day drive from Santa Fe, and we have friends there. Honestly, I also considered other possible options when we still weren’t sure how bad things were really going to get around here… including finding a house in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming or Montana to go even more extreme with our self-isolation.
Now, as you can tell from these descriptions, the challenge was that several of these options depended on other people changing or cancelling their plans. … That’s the rub. I’m not a fan of waiting patiently to see if someone else is going to make something possible before making my own life plans.
Remember, my comfort zone is to know where we’re sleeping months in advance. Despite having communicated with a variety of different hosts to give them a heads up that we might be interested in staying with them, we were essentially spending weeks waiting to see if our current host’s calendar would clear out since that was our 1st choice.
Brian and I decided that we were comfortable waiting until 1 month before (mid-April) the end of our currently booked stay (mid-May). Then, if the booking situation for our current condo hadn’t cleared out, we would start exploring Option #2 and see if we could find an alternate place here in Santa Fe.
Well, that weekend arrived in mid-April, and we got a message from our host here that she didn’t think her final booking in late May was going to cancel. They were “driving from Texas” and sure they still wanted their vacation. *Sigh* and thus, Option #1 seemed closed.
That’s when I started my usual process to contact various hosts in the Santa Fe area, explaining our situation of trying to extend our quarantine in Santa Fe, but needing to move out of our current rental. Here’s the good news: I found us a beautiful, three-bedroom home about 15 minutes from downtown that met all our criteria… and it took me about 24 hours. I started looking on Saturday afternoon, by Sunday afternoon I was negotiating and confirming with the new host, and by Tuesday we had a lease signed.
If you’re curious to learn my strategies for finding and negotiating Airbnb rentals at rates up to 76% below the published nightly price, then click the image below:
We had a great place now lined up, but there was only one hitch. Our prior planned road trip was booked to start on June 18th, but this new host still had a booking and needed us to leave by June 13th… *sigh*. Not perfect, but yet again, there was still a chance they would cancel. So, we moved forward and decided that, yet again, we’d just wait and see what happened with that booking and whether we’d be able to extend the last few days. In the meanwhile, signing this lease meant that we’d bought ourselves another month and now only had a 5-day gap rather than a 6-week gap.
Feeling “Ready” to Go
What has been rather curious and surprising to me is that ever since we found the new place, Brian and I have both been having these moments of feeling very “ready” to move. We’ve been verbally noting to each other things that we “won’t miss” or “will miss” about our current place.
For instance, we won’t miss the crazy, loud, 20-somethings that come to the park across the street. Yes, even during the quarantine, and they have their music base pumping so ferociously that it shakes the walls of our condo. They often zoom down the street, gunning their engines, and have been seen occasionally pulling crazy, reckless donuts in our condo parking lot.
Nope, not going to miss those guys AT ALL.
I will miss being so close to downtown and the plaza. But, honestly, with everything shut down we haven’t been able to take advantage of that for the past 2 months anyway. I will also miss our little park walks and the beautiful mountain views out our living room windows, which (aside from the loud, goof balls) have been such a blessing during this quarantine life.
However, our new place also has beautiful views toward the mountains (although not quite as close), and, being at the end of a cul du sac of a newer housing development with nothing currently behind it, we’re hoping that it will be much more peaceful.
The one irony? About 4 days after we signed the lease for our new place, I got a message from our current host saying that the Texans had changed their mind, and now her schedule was entirely clear through until late summer. *sigh*
On the one hand, if we’d been willing to wait a bit longer, then we could have avoided the move. On the other hand, the place we’re moving into is much larger, more quiet and private, and still has beautiful views of the Santa Fe valley area. Additionally, Brian and I are both feeling it… we’re ready to move (even if it is just across town.)
So, it all works out for the best in the end.
To give you a small taste of our ongoing life in quarantine, here a quick video:
The Carousel of Nannies
The other biggest drama in the past month has been our “nanny troubles.” When I saw the writing on the wall that our daughter’s school was going to close back in mid-March, I immediately reached out to someone who had babysat for us here for date nights in the past, and I asked if she would be interested in a part-time nanny position.
We discussed the importance of social distancing, impressed on her how we were essentially linking her family’s health to our own, and that we would be considering their health in all our decisions just as we would hope and expect she/they would consider ours.
Fast forward one month, and it was just a string of frustrations. Every. Single. Week. She was calling out for at least one day EVERY WEEK for a long string of reasons: family health issues, the exterminator visiting, snow – when there was barely an inch on the ground and none on the roads. Side note… I still do not understand how Santa Feans are so freaked out about levels of snow that would barely pause anything in other areas of the country like Lake Tahoe or New England. Completely baffling to me!
All her cancellations happened with rarely with more than 1 hour’s notice. So, suffice it to say I was pretty frustrated. Nevertheless, when she quit via text 30 minutes before she was scheduled to show up one day because she found a “better paying job”, I was both unsurprised and completely floored. Seriously? FYI for anyone who needs the reminder… leaving people screwed is a great way to burn bridges.
Unfortunately, I also felt slightly desperate for childcare coverage. I wasn’t done creating or delivering my course, The Freedom Evolution, at that time, and I couldn’t afford to lose any more work time (since I’d already lost at least 5+ days over the past month.) So, I hopped immediately on Care.com and starting sending messages, then within 30 minutes someone called me back. Hooray!!!! I was saved!!! … or so I thought.
While this time I did interview three candidates, I basically had the first person who called me back start coming the next day. Then, I did a couple more interviews (which weren’t stellar), so I decided this gal was “good enough,” and we’d just have her keep coming.
Well, a new person, but the absences continued. Finally, after the 3rd absence in 2 weeks, I expressed my frustration with her lack of reliability, and she told me that she really needed to find a full-time job anyway and quit on the spot (yet again via text with barely an hour’s notice.)
Seriously!? The complete lack of respect or professionalism floored me… AGAIN. But, here’s the lesson that apparently I needed to be reminded of and which I can share with you all: Treat hiring for childcare (and various other personal support roles) with the same level of care and thoroughness as you would hiring for a member of your business team.
That’s what I wasn’t doing. I was making the classic mistake that I’ve taught other entrepreneurs to avoid for years – don’t just choose the first person who shows up. Have a hiring process! Just like I taught in last week’s Insights Video, and when you treat childcare providers like professionals, then you’re more likely to find someone who will behave professionally.
This time I collected close to 20 candidates, did a full round of interviews with three candidates. I asked some new and different questions to suss out their reliability and attitude toward their work and relationships on previous jobs, AND I requested and called three references for my top candidate to confirm that she had been reliable for jobs in the past. Finally, I had our top candidate sign a contractor agreement (which I hadn’t used since last year because our Pumpkin has largely been attending preschools/daycares this year).
The basic idea: handle even childcare hires just as you would your VA, graphic designer, copywriter, or any other member of your team. Now, I’m very hopeful that we’ve found someone who’ll be reliable (according to her references) and happy to stay with us through the rest of our stay in New Mexico (*fingers crossed*).
Time For The Move
By the time this gets published next week, we will have completed our move to the new Santa Fe house, so make sure you follow me on Instagram or Facebook (@ChosenCourse) to get all the inside stories about settling into our new home.
We intentionally decided to “overlap” the two bookings by a couple days to make the move easier. The two houses are only 15 minutes apart, so, my grand plan? Take it a room at a time, chuck stuff into bags, drive them over, then unpack them directly into the new place.
Wash, rinse, repeat until everything is relocated. No fancy packing, no careful games of car Tetris trying to get everything to fit in… just toss it all together and get it moved over. Since we overlapped the bookings by about 48 hours the hope is this will be as painless a process as possible.
Ideally, the moving and settling in process will all happen largely in the same weekend. We shall see if I’m right about that ;). This move is unlike any move we’ve had since becoming Digital Nomads. Usually, if we’re packing up then we’re completely leaving town, so yet another case of very unusual situations due to Covid, but it should make for a much more low-key packing process which is highly desirable.
What About Our June Road Trip?
Now, if you remember, when we signed our lease on the new place here in Santa Fe, there was still a 5-day gap between when she needed us to leave and when we already had our road trip places booked between New Mexico and Portland, OR. Well, we got good news just last night, that her booking for that following week has cancelled, so we will be able to extend our stay for the final few days.
Which means that there’s only one final X-factor out there – Will Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Parks reopen by mid-June? That is the current projection according to various “parks insider” websites, but as we all know, in the land of Covid-19 nothing is certain.
Long before the whole world changed, we planned and booked out a scenic road trip that would take us through the Colorado Rocky Mountains and up to Yellowstone National Park before turning west towards Portland.
Obviously, that road trip route has become a bit uncertain. We’re paying attention to the “hot spot” places in Colorado, and to the projections and plans to reopen the national parks too. If things start looking dicey over the next few weeks, then we may decide to cancel all those plans and just “book it” to Portland, OR in as few days/nights as possible, going super directly and driving long days to reduce any chances of exposure to Coronavirus en route
At the moment, I’d put the odds at about 70/30 in favor of keeping our CO/WY road trip plan, but I should know the answer to that question by the time our June Course Update goes live… so stay tuned!
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