Hi, everyone, and welcome to women who travel, a podcast from Coninast Traveler. I'm Meredith Carey,

and with me, as always, is my co-host, Lale-a-a-Coglu.

Hello. Like many of you, we've also had to cancel trips as a result of the current pandemic.

In fact, Lale was supposed to be on vacation in Antigua at this very moment.

And it's been really hard to find our way through all of the complicated emotions that have come

with putting life on hold and sheltering in place. To work through it all with us, we have Megan

Sparell, newly anointed, associate editor, a traveler. Congratulations, Megan. Thank you very much.

And Julia Buckley, a traveler contributor and frequent traveler based in the UK.

Hello. Before we get started, I just wanted to say thank you to Sydney Baker and Anna Stenauer

for sharing what they wanted to hear from Wally and I on

Instagram and inspiring this week's episode. Wally, do you want to kick it off with the first

question? I do. I'm actually going to kick it off with a question for you, Julia, which is

that while as the pandemic took hold around the world, you were actually travelling a lot and were

abroad when you realised that you needed to be back in the UK sheltering in place. Could you

talk through a little bit about what that experience was like and what it took to get home?

Yeah, it was actually really surreal. So I was in the middle of

this month-long trip around South America in Brazil and then Uruguay and then I was going to

Argentina and then back to Brazil before I finished. And it happened when I was in Uruguay and

the whole time in Brazil Brazil I'd seen things happening

and had kind of seen what was coming but I didn't realize how fast it was going to be and I was

also feeling a lot more safe over there than I was than I would have felt at home and wasn't

that excited at the idea of coming home so my thought thought was, oh, by the time I spent a month

...