2022 USA Trip Part 1—A False Start

Thanks to COVID, the most travelling we did as a family was to visit Victoria Falls in 2020¹. COVID receeded somewhat and we planned to visit the United States. We would have gone in December 2021, but Omicron hit resulting in every country banning Zimbabweans from entering to try and stop this new variant². Because of this, we postponed the trip until we found a good time and reason to visit the US. That came in August so we could leave my little sibling in Idaho.

Over a number of posts, I’ll go over my US trip in August and we’ll start with planning.

The Original Plan

The plan was that we’d start with a Carribian cruise from Miami, head to Orlando before meeting a family friend in Philly, with a lot of activitied planned within those days. With our cruise and flights booked, flights acquired as well as our forex allocation, all we had to do was wait for December 12 to head to the US. I was supposed to go to Cape Town before then, but I couldn’t get money in time so I left it for another day.

As the travel day drew near, omicron was increasingly becoming a problem. We thought we could squeeze in but suddenly every country banned Southern Africans from visiting in a bid to stop omicron². Sour grapes but I doubt we would have been able to get back since a lot of flight crew had COVID. While this sucked, I was worried that the dramatic increase in cases would destroy the healthcare system as the previous waves brought it to the brink.

Thankfully that didn’t happen, but we did lose our desire to travel. It didn’t help that January to March was winter. The best thing of all this was that the things we bought could be rebooked for free.

Man Plans, God Laughs Take 2—Planning our Trip

Fortunatley, my sibling got a place at college and we decided to travel in August. We tried asking when they started orientation but they took forever to respond. We couldn’t risk price rises so we decided to book a cruise from the 8^th–12^th, the Orlando timeshare from the 12^th–19^th and two days in Idaho before flying back to Zim through LA.

Once we had booked, we finally got the orientation schedule and my sibling actually started on the 15th, meaning that they couldn’t stay in Orlando. At this point, travel chaos was in full swing so prices had gone up by a lot. Airfare and hotels were fortunatley changable, but it wasn’t much comfort given how expensive things were. Had we known earlier,we would have stayed in the West Coast.

At this point we would be set right? Actually no, the travel chaos came for us too and you’ll hear all about it in the next post.