Finding the Silver Linings + Responsible Travel Right Now – Pandemic Update #3

Sam: Welcome back everyone to the podcast. Hope you all are doing well. How are you doing, Veren?

Veren: Doing quite well as usual.

Sam: Glad to hear it. Yeah, so this episode we're gonna basically talk about that - do a little pandemic update. It's been a couple months since we did a pandemic update episode and as everyone knows, the situation changes on the daily. We're still getting lots of questions and stuff about what we're doing and wanting to hear more about that. So yeah, we thought we would just talk about the state of travel and what that looks like for us.

This kind of comes in part thanks to the responses that we've already gotten from our feedback survey. So thank you so much to everyone who has taken a moment to fill out our listener survey. So if you have not yet, we would love love to hear from you. It is literally five questions it takes on average three minutes to do and it'll greatly help us help you with what you want to hear from us. The link is bit.ly/ATsurvey2020 and we will also leave a link in the show notes to that as well.

Veren: Yeah, we get a lot of readers or listeners asking how can they help support us on the blog and the podcast. Right now a great way is to take that survey. So if you haven't taken that survey, please take that survey. It'll mean the world to us and it will help shape the future of alternative travelers.

Sam: Yeah, we're going to leave it up until September 1st so this episode will come out the last week of August and we'll leave it up until around the first I think. Obviously if you're listening to this in the future and the survey is not live but you want to give your feedback, we welcome feedback always. We just know that sometimes it helps to have some guiding questions.

If you're listening to this in the future, just feel free to send us your thoughts anyway. What kind of stuff you want to hear about on the podcast, maybe things you’re struggling with alternative traveling or traveling in an alternative way. Anyway, feel free to always send your feedback, so yeah with that, let's jump right into things with the state of travel.

We have done a couple of pandemic update episodes: one right when all the shit hit the fan basically, and another one when we first landed in Buffalo New York. So this would be our third one, so we're here in Buffalo now. And yeah, what are things looking like for us?

Veren: Well I would say that things have almost normalized pretty steadily here. You see people out and about. You can eat inside places and you can eat outdoors anywhere that has outdoor seating. You see people going about their days, everyone tries to social distance, everyone has a mask, and if they're not wearing it, it's usually because maybe they're outside and away from people. But everyone's pretty good about it and things more or less feel very stable and safe. it has that appearance.

Now, York City is different from the rest. There's some exceptions that have been made for New York City and not in a good way at meaning, they don't have indoor seating at all and when gyms start to open up for the rest of New York, they're not gonna do that for New York City and understandably.

I mean, we're still in a pandemic. it is still a real thing that is happening and can change and we've seen that on the daily. So with that in mind, we've been proceeding with caution, but that doesn't mean we haven't been traveling. We do believe it's possible to safely travel in a very fun and meaningful way. Just because You can't hop on a plane doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to travel. So we've been doing a whole bunch of things very very locally.

Sam: Yeah, we had a whole episode on this basically how to make it safe to travel / kind of re-defining your definition of travel. So that's a great one. But yeah just to reiterate, we're just all about the local hyperlocal travel these days.

The furthest we've gone - basically a couple weeks ago we did a camping trip and that was a lot of fun. We visited a friend of mine who lives a few hours away in New York state. Because it's like about eight hours to drive from Buffalo to New York City, they’re on both ends of the state. so it's a large state. Most states are pretty large, but just to give you an idea.

We rented a car because we don't own a car; but we rented one to be able to go drive there. it was a couple hours away, a region in New York called the Finger Lakes region, which is a really gorgeous area of the state. There's lots of wineries and history and a lot of stuff like that so we wanted to take advantage because my friend’s significant other’s family owns a bunch of property which includes some lakefront property, so we were able to camp there on the lake.

Veren has some camping gear from before we even met when he used to go camping a lot more. So we just were able to use that. We hadn't been traveling with camping gear. We got this out of storage, storage basically being families homes. We don't normally travel camping gear so we wanted to take advantage of having the tent, having friends nearby that we could stay in the property without having to deal with camping at a campground where there would be a lot of people around.

We were still being safe with my friend. We were always hanging out outside and still maintaining distance and whatever. So yeah that's just a little bit about what that trip was like, it was just a couple of overnights but yeah, we really can't sing the praises enough of local travel. I guarantee you there's plenty of places wherever you are if you're feeling that travel itch. There's so many undiscovered places, but we've talked at length about this in other episodes. We just wanted to share what we've been doing. So that was one thing, what else what else have you been excited about being in one place or a local travel, Veren?

Veren: well the advantage with traveling in one place or at least having a home base is that you really kind of are able to connect the dots. you can kind of really get a bigger sense of the entire picture of a place and the history, instead of just passing through for a couple days. So we've just been seeing so many different parts of Buffalo and the surrounding areas.

I love biking. I use the bike share to go all over the different bike routes they have along the city. So in that way I’ve covered a lot of ground and have seen most of the city, but there's also some bike routes that you can take outside of the city that connect to towns over. So there’s a great trail system and when I say trails a lot of these are paved. I'm taking paved ones because I don't have my mountain bike.

And then there's other little local things we go there. There's a lot of cool interesting old buildings around that we like to check out sometimes, abandoned buildings as well. These are all things that you can do on foot with friends and easily social distance outside. Ask someone maybe if they know the area, what are some cool things to check out. I mean, just a lot of urban exploring really.

Sam: Yeah the other day we went urban exploring with my cousin who is really into that kind of stuff so she knew some very cool spots. And yeah, that's another thing that's been really great. One of the reasons we came to Buffalo is because I have a community here because I lived here for 10 years and a lot of my mom's side of the family is here. All of my cousins are here.

I only have four cousins and they're all here, so I've been really reconnecting with them. Growing up, there were large age differences. With me and my youngest cousin, there's eight years apart, so that's a big deal when someone's 8 and I was 16. So it's been really awesome just to get to know them as adults.

It was already a priority for us to spend more time around family, but we didn't expect to be in one place certainly for this long. But we're really not bemoaning it at all, we're just like, “this is the new situation and there's a lot of great things about it.” I don't think we would've ever chosen, you know, in a pre-covid world to just randomly rent a place in Buffalo. But it's been great actually. I have some of my oldest friends here that really know and like exploring the area. So yeah that has been really one of the biggest positives, I think for me at least and Veren has been enjoying hearing all the stories about like 15 year old Sam.

Veren: Yeah. I love all the stories about 15 year old emo. Sam.

Sam: Yeah, so anyway, we're just sharing these kinds of things to hopefully get you thinking about maybe the positives of what where you are right now. Obviously everyone's situation is different and it might be harder to see those positives. I certainly have days where I'm really frustrated about things. but overall, we're pretty happy here. I think being full-time travelers we've gotten pretty good at adapting to different circumstances and this is just another different circumstance. Would you say you would agree with that, Veren?

Veren: yeah absolutely. As full-time travelers via house sitting we're essentially signing up for a new set of circumstances every couple of months and now we just happen to sign up for one that is almost indefinite. But still, we didn't sign on to like a year lease or anything so we have just a very small amount of time that we have to give a heads up if we decided we wanted to leave.

So in a lot of ways it just gives us a real sense of control and security in a time where it seems like everything's up in the air and there doesn't seem to be any kind of sense of what direction of where things are headed. I know for us and for our mental well-being and emotional well-being and even physical well being, all the well-beings, being safe in one place is what is working for us.

I find it kind of unfortunate that a lot of people are really frustrated so much that they can't go traveling like they used to. I think they're overlooking some really great key aspects of being able to be in one place.

And also, this is what we're all working with. Yes, we all have some different circumstances people. Some people are in less fortunate places than we are and vice versa, but I also strongly believe that for the most part travel is still a luxury and a privilege. It’s not entirely necessary for a fulfilling life to be able to hop on a plane and go across the continent or whatever. There's lots of great things to do right in your backyard. I feel like we just need to keep hammering that idea home again and again.

Sam: Yeah, I totally agree, and I was definitely always more on the “I need to always be traveling” mindset and I would always want to be going different places and whatever. But there is a lot of value in slowing down.

We obviously talk about slow travel a lot, and I just see this as another iteration of that basically. I mean, we're doing here in Buffalo all the things that we would be doing if we were house sitting somewhere else local exploring, urban exploring, trying new restaurants. It looks a little different obviously. We haven't done indoor dining even though it's possible here. We just don't need to do that yet. So we might set outside or grab takeout or whatever it is.

But yeah the long and the short of it is that we are planning on staying here until some future where travel is more open again. We're obviously in the US, we're American, and we can't really go anywhere else anyway. We listen to the experts basically, in interviews, reading stuff, just keeping on top of these things.

I know no one wants to hear it, but it's probably going to get worse in the fall, at least in the US. I don't know about elsewhere, but probably elsewhere as more people are just hanging out inside.That's why we've even been seeing people like my cousins, because we spend the entirety of the time outside. It's very easy to socially distance. That's gonna be very different when you can't hang out outside. So we're not launching back into a full-time travel with a completely unknown future that could lead us to having to scramble for housing again like we did twice already in the pandemic, which was incredibly stressful obviously.

We want to keep doing what we're doing. We want to be able to keep doing this podcast. We've really been enjoying it. We want to keep working on everything alternative travelers related. When you don't know where you’re going to be living, obviously that's a priority above everything else, so just it throws everything out of whack.

Here, we're really able to think and be creative. So yeah, so that's kind of where we're at.

Veren: Yeah, so that's a good place to start transitioning into talking about travel at large.

We're all kind of dealing with it at the moment and yeah, to just second what Sam is saying, I think it's really important. It's crazy that this is even a thing. It should just be the default that we should be listening to experts and the authorities on these things.

It's not a time to say, “I'm gonna travel because it's who I am and I need to travel and it's my personal choice.” No. It can affect other people dramatically and that’s why we're kind of in the problem that we're in in the first place.

As full-time travelers we don't think right now is a good time to be full-time traveling. Even if you could do it safely in terms of the pandemic, there's just so much at risk in terms of emotional mental and physical health. So we're not saying you can't travel now. we're just saying you need to think about travel differently. If you were ready to embark on a life of full-time travel, if you were living a life of full-time travel, now's not the time, we don't think it's a good idea.

Sam: Yeah, most people probably have probably figured out a long-term situation at this point, but yeah, I think I would just reiterate that we'd recommend people to find a secure long-term situation wherever you are. Obviously again, we're talking from being in the US and things are not not great over here, even though we're in New York state, which is doing relatively well all things considered and especially where we are but.

Okay.

Yeah, that's okay what I think but yeah future. Yeah, I I think this idea of that you're a decision to travel is just your own personal choice is really problematic and it can be as it's just it when you travel you're not just only affecting yourself you're constantly coming in contact with other people and right now a lot of essential workers is well it's an easy to sing their praises and be like wow, these people are great a lot of them would much rather be home and safe instead of coming to in contact with millions of people, you know, so, Keep that in mind I feel that you know somebody in the future or as soon as possible it should be mandated that everyone works a service job in their life because then you can much more readily empathize with people who have to provide services to other people but they don't you know, it's like at a restaurant they have to wear a mask and other people can be pains in the butt not wear mask and refuse to wear a mask and they're putting those workers in danger more than the workers are putting them in danger because the mask is protecting your you know, exhalations from hitting other people, you know, so that's just one example of how this kind of attitude of.

What was just a personal choice can be very very problematic but I know of a even better example that I know Sam has recently come upon.

Sam: So that nice lead in Veren. yeah, so I listened to an interview the other day with a Navajo woman who lives in the Navajo Nation in the southwest of the United States and near to the Grand Canyon and she was talking about the influx of people coming in to do road trips in the area.

I imagine that people are thinking, “If I need to travel domestically, I'm gonna go to like the most epic place and national parks in the United States are amazing definitely we've been to several and they're great but there's just a lot of people flocking to these places right now and she was talking about the impact that it was having on her community.

So in a couple ways. Basically one is that roadtrippers are taking provisions that normally the Navajo community would be accessing. There's a limited amount of provisions out there. I don't know the exact geography but it's not like it's that easy to get large amounts of provisions to the area. so there's only a few grocery stores that folks on the Navajo nation rely on and instead roadtrippers are buying out those grocery stores with those price for their road trip, so that's one way they're just taking supplies whether it's groceries, whether it's gas like fueling up for their road trips, and that's gas that.

The Navajo community would need to drive their cars and trucks and whatever because obviously there's no public transportation in the desert. Also just the sheer numbers of people that are coming through there is putting the community at risk.

And this woman was talking about how she is fearful because she lives with her elderly mother and she doesn't want to expose her. So she's just like,”I'm just concerned, whenever I go to the gas station, there's so many people around.” There's just a lot more risk of exposure the more people that are coming in, flying into Vegas and then driving, or they're driving from California or whatever.

The more people coming from more places, the more risk. She normally runs a food truck business serving traditional food, but she's not running it anymore because she doesn't want to put her mother at risk.

She was just talking about things like they don't have electricity where she lives and they have to carry water in large buckets for you know, drinking water or bathing water water for their animals all that kind of stuff, so it just really struck me that this woman who doesn't even have electricity in her home or water running water.

Was talking about the effect on her community. That roadtrippers have and I do think we really need to remember this again we're talking about local travel travel locally you don't need to go to like the most epic thing you don't need to go to the Grand Canyon. You don't there's so much to explore nearby.

That you don't need to be putting I think it's it's. Hard to I mean, I didn't even think about that before I had listened to this interview so that's why I wanted to share it because it wasn't something that was really on my radar and it definitely wasn't something that's been being talked about by all these travel influencers that are promoting trout and like you can travel right now as long as you do it safely and like parents said, oh so you feel comfortable it's fine.

So anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because our decision to travel has ripple effects that are potentially unseen and this is an example just of one one woman sharing her story with her community, but I'm sure there's countless others and not even obviously it's.

This goes for communities like hers, indigenous native communities, but also just small rural communities as well, where access to provisions is a problem. More people coming into an area that's not set up for more people is a problem in a pandemic.

So. I'll stop myself before I keep going on about this, but I do think it's really important to keep in mind when you are thinking about travel these days.

Veren: Yeah the the part about that that particularly strikes me is how the the elderly parts the elders and the families are just staying home and doing what they need to do and I feel that's been the case for the most part and a lot of the US people who are feeling more vulnerable the the older population are taking it very seriously and it seems now the numbers are showing that it's a lot of young people who are still driving the pandemic and I just hear that where these people are living where they never mind the horrible history of just like the subjugation and genocide of the indigenous peop.

Les of Americas but now when they're living on these you know reservations where they just don't have access to the things that most of us take for granted when they're told, hey you need to stay home to be safe they do it, you know, I mean, I just they also are part of the riskier populations in terms of the pandemic but it's just it makes me so frustrated here about people who are just getting itchy feet and just can't stay still so to speak when they probably can still do an experience so much more freedom than so many people in this country can all can't so it's just like it's just, One of those.

Moments where it's just so I feel like they just need to be told to check their privilege and these influencers are just being irresponsible. You can travel safely. It is possible but that doesn't mean it's a guarantee across the board. You need to look into things. You need to do some local research.

And also why go to these parks when they're swamped with people? We travel to get away from people in the first place. I don't want to go to the Grand Canyon when it's swapped with people. It sounds terrible.

Sam: Well, you did go to the Grand Canyon Veren, didn't you?

Veren: Yeah, my friend insisted. I was kind of interested because you know, you just hear about it like, “oh my god, it's the Grand Canyon.” There were some fun things to do there, but my least favorite part were just all the tourists swamping everything and just the lines. So for me, sometimes that stuff can kind of kill it.

But my rule of thumb for those experiences is to go to a place that requires you to walk or exert some kind of physical energy and it will thin out the crowd by about 90 percent. So as soon as we went farther down on this one hike that takes you down into the Grand Canyon, as soon as we went past a certain point, you don't see anybody, because then it becomes hard and there's not like, I don't know, a robot to cut your ass around.

Sam: Well either I'm gonna go there by myself someday or we're gonna go again because I really want to go. I'm jealous. But Veren went with a friend of ours and our friend was like, “oh my god the Grand Canyon it's just the most epic thing ever!” But I would like to go, maybe do what your other friends do, which is an overnight backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. That sounds cool. But it takes a lot of planning.

Veren: Yeah, you’ve got to plan very far in ahead to get a reservation there and I don't even know what if that's like. I'm just you know, if it's a big epic place I'm crossing it off my list. Don't need to go.

Sam: All right. I'll go by myself then when the pandemic is over. But yeah.

Veren: So what does this mean for house sitters and pet owners that want to use house sitters?

Sam: Basically because people aren't really traveling at the same levels and nowhere near the same levels as before as you could imagine. There's a smaller number of listings available. So I like to monitor these things.

I like to look at the data and yeah the house sits that are popping up are very short: several days, maybe a week, people wanting to get away briefly. Obviously you can't really line up back-to-back house sits of three days, especially not when there's just very few and they're all over the place. Obviously the US is a gigantic country and you're not gonna go to a three-day house sit in California and then a five-day house sit in Florida and then another three-day house sit in Texas, that would be insane in normal times, let alone a pandemic. So that's a little bit with what the landscape is looking like in terms of house sits. We already talked about this more in depth in our state of house sitting 2020 episode but I just want to say again that house sitting locally is where it's at right now, surprise surprise. Travel locally, house sit locally. But it really is the name of the game right now.

If you're listening to this and you've been thinking about trying house sitting now could be surprisingly a good time because people who are looking for house sitters, maybe they want to go on a weekend getaway, they want local house sitters. In case they need to cancel, no one's gonna be hurt really by it. No one is gonna be that inconvenienced. So people are even more gonna have a preference for getting local house sitters.

In the past, this was already the case, we experienced that and we've talked about that in our blog posts and our book and everything, but it's even more the case now that people want local house sitters. So if you've been thinking of trying it out now is a good time. If you're like us and you're full-time sitters but you found a place to hunker down and wait this all out, you can still be doing local house sits just to keep house sitting.

We love house sitting, we really miss the animals. We are literally just making friends with dogs at the farmer's market or cats on the street that are hanging out outside their house or whatever. So we really miss the animals and we're definitely open to doing a local house sit. One has not come up yet.

I think New Yorkers in general are quite wary and cautious since things got so bad in New York City. Even though we're not in New York City, we're still in the state and I think the state as a whole just is a little more on edge maybe because of how bad things got in New York City. So yeah, we haven't had the opportunity to do any local house sits yet, but we're definitely down for the right one and yeah, that's kind of what we are encouraging fellow householders to do as well.

What about pet owners Veren, do we have any words for them?

Veren: Pet owners well first I want to say for the house sitters: just understand that if you go into housesitting now, there's tons of housesitters and very few house sits. So the competition is going to be fierce.

I say that because pet owners should know that going in, they're going to have way more applicants than they ever thought they would get. Often people love the idea of using house sitters, but don't go through with it because they think no one wants to come to where they live. Overwhelmingly that's what we hear. Nowadays that probably won't be the case. You'll probably get 50+ applicants, which is the top number that you can see on TrustedHousesitters, the platform that we use.

That's a lot of people to wade through and figure out who's the best fit. So with the right precautions, this absolutely could be a time where you could use house sitters to help you in your travels, especially because you don't want to necessarily travel with your pets. Even if they're somewhat travel friendly, the logistics is so much more complicated.

So we strongly recommend for pet owners to look into using house sitters especially local house sitters and be really upfront about the situation, because one problem I've seen with a lot of listings is almost no mention of the pandemic, as if the world of house exists in a vacuum. I think it would show more responsibility to have a little part in there to saying, “we'll go over covid house sitting specifics if and when we make a match, etc etc”

Just some kind of mention or acknowledgement but I don't see any of that unfortunately in virtually most of the sittings listed. so if you're gonna be a pet owner trying to get house sitters, you're gonna get the more responsible ones weeded out of the mix if you show that you're taking this pandemic seriously. I mean, that's the win-win for both sides.

Sam: Yeah completely that is a good point to bring up that there is a lot more competition now how sitting-wise because there are - I mean, we don't know definitively but I would guess - are a lot of people like us, full-time house sitters, that maybe have not found a good place to hunker down yet. Or maybe they're with family and it's not working out, so they're understandably looking for other options.

So there are a lot more applicants for every listing. And if you go about it, do so smartly and safely and strategically. We think you can definitely still house sit right now. It's by nature a pretty socially distance friendly thing to do, because you're just going from your isolated house to someone else's. There's obviously some more steps you might need to take just like Veren said, have a conversation about precautions, stuff like that is very important.

But yeah, local house sitting could definitely be possible depending on where you are and if there are house sits there and stuff like that.

Yeah, we just wanted to share what we're thinking there and kind of a little bit about what the house sitting community is going through or what you could expect.

Veren: well speaking of what you can expect, where are we even seeing house sits in the US right now?

Sam: I've been mostly seeing them popping up in Florida in California, so that's kind of not that surprising I guess.

Veren: Also what's going on in California?

Sam: Fires in California and covid spikes in both places. Obviously these are big states and the situation varies greatly within the state, but I just think it's maybe a little telling that those are the states that people want to travel, even though things are spiking.

So yeah, like I said, there's really not many house sits in the northeast of the US. So that's where we are and that's that's fine. I mean, like I said, we miss house sitting but we're working on other things. We already shared things that we're excited about and we're just taking it as it comes.

Always keep in mind obviously that cancellations are a very real possibility right now, so you need to make sure you have a backup plan - several backup plans actually. So, you're not caught scrambling at the last minute if things change, which they constantly are. You don't want to be left scrambling for a place to stay.

Veren: I mean before covid, before the whole pandemic, we didn't have a permanent place to fall back on. I mean we had friends and family who were willing to give us a place to stay, but you know almost all our friends and family lived in New York City. So they would have a couch, you know, or maybe an extra bed in a corner and we need to be able to work from home.

So while these were options that we could consider they were not something that we wanted to be doing for more than a couple of nights, maybe in between gaps for a house sit. So nowadays full-time house sitting is just kind of out of the question and we don't recommend it for anyone. We want to kind of drive that point home: now is not the time to full-time travel.

It's so important that if you do, that you have that contingency plan. Cancellations, while they're always a possibility, they are at their highest more than ever. There's a very strong likelihood that your sit might get cancelled and you don't want to fly to somewhere and then have to spend a lot of money trying to find last minute accommodations.

So ideally have your own place that you can fall back on or if you're gonna travel pretty far flung where your place is in an option if that's it where to get canceled and you're away from home you have the money for emergency last minute accommodations.

Sam: Yeah, which is obviously always more expensive and it's more stressful especially in appendemic. Obviously if you have the funds to always be paying for accommodation, this might not apply. If you want a full-time travel and always pay for accommodation, then I guess you could do that right now. But I think a lot of what we're talking about would still apply.

Because we're still in a pandemic and things can always change and also a lot of stuff is closed and it's not there's just so many hoops you have to jump through here in the US even going between States you have to quarantine you might need to get a test there's just so much more.

That you have to think about when traveling further distances right now. Yeah, just for us we're just like why would we do that when we can have a lot of fun here getting to know a different area better. Like we said, there's lots of cool stuff around here.

I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff wherever you are so. Yeah, that's kind of the gist of what we wanted to share today. I know you always have some closing words Veren.

Veren: I just want to say again, remember that travel is a privilege. It's a luxury and until all the world can travel, you need to keep that in mind. If you were a person that was a frequent traveler before, there's no reason you can't be a frequent traveler now, just you know, try to look at things differently. If you really need some help with that perspective, look at one of our previous episodes, I'm sure we'll provide in the show notes, it was just about redefining your definition of travel.

I encourage you to rethink that and don't just be so quick to listen to anyone who's like, “it's okay to travel, it's a personal choice.” I think that's just irresponsible and there's other people who are gonna have to pay for those consequences. If you're not concerned about your health and you're not worried at all because you have health care, keep in mind that other people who you might spread it to don't have access to those same things that you have.

So going forward keep in mind. When you have privileges in life, you need to be responsible and accountable when you use them and not abuse them.

Sam: Yeah, well now I do have a last line. You got me thinking again that I just yeah, I want to encourage you to look at who you're following in terms of travel influencers or even podcasters and bloggers and stuff. Again, do your research into everything. If someone is saying, you can just travel and it's fine,maybe re-evaluate whether that's someone you want to be following their word on. If they're not thinking about all these nuances that we've mentioned and discussed, that's a problem honestly. We can't go back to acting like travel is fine normal when it's not. Just because we want it to be fine and normal doesn't make it so.

Everyone should be on some level talking about responsible travel, which is about leaving a positive contribution on local communities and not negatively impacting them. Potentially traveling right now could be leaving a negative impact if you unknowingly bring the virus to a new place, they're not a new place but a different place or something again.

Just be really thinking about all these things, think these things through when it comes to travel and everything right now, honestly. So yeah. I guess we'll just leave that there then.

Veren: Yeah in case also another concluding statement. If you see stuff about trying to act like things are normal, you don't want to listen to either. There's people who really badly want it to seem like things are okay and normal and that this will just somehow go away. That's not what's gonna happen. So listen to authorities, listen to experts, don't just think about yourself, recognize that we're all connected in this. We can all get through this together if we all act and think responsibly.

Travel responsibly ™ Like when you see that on the bottle of beer, drink responsibly, we're telling you to travel responsibly.

Sam: yeah exactly alright so thanks so much for listening and again quick reminder to fill out our feedback alternative travelers feedback survey, if you hadn't had a chance already it is the link is bit.ly/ATsurvey2020

And i will also leave a link in the show notes and the description wherever you're listening to your podcast the episode description will be right there couldn't be easier it's five questions look three minutes and again if you're listening to this in the future and the survey is over we always welcome your feedback, so please share get in touch with us we are on social media at alternative travelers.

Instagram is really the best place to find us. I'm on there, it's me, so if you message me, it's always me, Sam. But yeah, that's a good place or you can send us an email and we would love to hear from you.

Veren: Yeah, and if you're saying as an email just go to our contact us page on our website and you'll have a form that you can fill out and everything and we'll make sure that you're not a robot.

Sam: Yeah, unfortunately, we got a lot of spam hence the contact form. I'll leave a link to that as well, so yeah with that thanks again for listening and we will be here next week.

Veren: catch y'all later.