Countdown and Cancellations

Right before all the quarantines and lockdowns began, we signed a lease with a nice family to rent our house starting in mid-summer. Then the whole world changed, so now it isn’t clear whether or not that lease makes any sense. They’ve been super nice and understanding, and all they asked is that we make a decision either way by the end of April. Totally reasonable, because they need to know whether or not they need to start house hunting again. (They’re moving here, so their plans are unchanged despite the virus.)

So that gives us - gulp - nine days to guess what the future holds and make a decision that will then splinter off into a million smaller decisions. Coolcoolcoolcoolcool. No pressure.

We’ve all at least somewhat come to terms with the fact that our trip will change. We’re past the acceptance stage of the grief, but we’re all working through the other stages at different paces and in all different orders. (No, I’m not comparing this loss to the death of a loved one. But the whole world is grieving the loss of our pre-COVID society, so the grief rules do apply.)

The hardest part now is the unknown. This is the universal hard part, right? The not knowing. The inability to plan ahead more than a few days. The blanks we all desperately want to fill in about our schools, work lives, travel plans, and health.

For us, I can simplify the main two possibilities here (though each possibility has countless sub-possibilities).

1) We keep our lease agreement, stay here until it begins, and in the meantime hope that things will open up for us to begin our adventure just a couple months late.
Pros: We don’t want to mess up our renters’ plans, and this would let them continue as agreed. We’d still have the income from renting that would help us pay for whatever adventure we do end up on. We’d be sort of forced into finding some form of adventure, pretty close to our original timeline. We could potentially travel within the US if it’s safe to do so, OR we could try to find a month-to-month rental in Boulder.
Cons: The chances of international travel opening up by summer are almost zero, which would limit us to US-only travel at best or renting a house somewhere at worst. Sub-con: Hard as I’m trying, I just cannot get excited about touring around the US for that stretch. I’d personally rather wait it out in Boulder so the kids could have some normalcy and friend time for a while. Mike (correctly) points out that rent would be higher here than most places, so he’d prefer to be elsewhere if we have to be renting a place. We aren’t arguing about this or anything, but it’s a big decision, and we aren’t as aligned as we normally are.

2) We let the lease go and hang tight at home till we get the all clear.
Pros: This would allow us to just let the virus and quarantine run its course while we see how everything plays out, safely from our home. The kids could stick with their schooling, whether that is in-person or at-home. And as the rules lessen a bit, they could have some time to catch up with their friends. (We adults could, too!) All the subsequent decisions to cancel/not cancel/postpone would be detached from our housing, which would take a ton of stress off.

Cons: Finding good renters wasn’t nothing. We listed in multiple places, fought with a Zillow glitch for weeks, had to keep the house show-ready, coordinated with multiple potential renters, and Mike did a lot of emailing and lease-writing, negotiations, etc. Not all of that work would have to be repeated, but a lot of it would. In the same way I’m having to let go of so much work I did in booking/researching/coordinating different legs of our trip, Mike would have to see much of his work go down the drain. Also, chances are the real estate market will be affected just like everything else right now, so who knows whether or not we’d be able to get the same monthly rent later this year. It could cost us some real money.

One thing that happened today that both hurts (emotionally) and helps (logistically) is that we finally got our first cancellation. We were scheduled to spend almost three weeks in Copenhagen on a home exchange this summer - oddly enough, starting the same day our lease would have. The exchanger there contacted us today to let us know she can’t host us anymore, because her trip will be off as well. While it makes me very sad, it is certainly not a surprise and I have no doubt she’s just as disappointed as we are. Hopefully we can stay connected with her and maybe stay at her place somewhere down the line, when we all have more flexibility again. The upside to this is that it finally pulls the trigger for me, to start actually letting go of some other reservations and plans. At least it’s one small blank filled in, even if I hate it.