Justin calls at 6:15 am as he wants to film the hot air balloons which will be floating overhead from our balcony.  Corey follows and for this hour it’s just us and two teens watching over a 100 floating balloons go by.  Reminiscent of the song “99 Red Balloons” by Nina in the 80s.  Ooops, any millennial reading this won’t get that reference. 

Here the world seems to be crashing around us but we are sitting in this joyful, peaceful moment of time-lapse videos and colorful panoramas as the sky turns from a deep blue to light orange to light baby blue.  A Perrier Balloon literally goes right over our hotel so close you can feel like you can touch it.  

We sit here with two nice teenagers whom we love and adore and, most importantly, enjoy hanging out with.  As a family, we have grown closer to during these past several months.  

The daytime is reserved for emergency contingency planning, cancelling bookings and wrangling over Coronavirus impacted travel plans. 

ATV’ing anyone?  Ok we’ve seen Cappadocia from the ground via a van and from the air via the hot air balloon ride but now we will tour part of this valley even more intimately via an ATV. It was such a hit in Costa Rica we decide on it again. 

It didn’t disappoint as we cruise through dusty trails next to 10 million year plus white, tan and orange rock formations that are up to 4 stories high. We cruise through Rose Valley and Love Valley with several stops to take photos and drink in this unique beauty. It’s been compared to Utah but with carved out cages the area has an ethereal and mystical sense of a time gone by.  

At the last stop to watch the sunset, there’s a van out here pumping out the tunes. A guy selling hot wine.  Several tourists try to get their sunset Titanic-like photos in standing on a plank like rock soaring high in the sky. Sometimes when we are in a more cynical mood we wonder if people just travel for the perfect Instagram shots!  

After ATV’ing, we stroll through the small town of Goreme where several restaurant owners are hawking their restaurant and menu.  We walk up to one and the guy is bursting with excitement.  Before I can even look at the menu, he blurts out that he will give us a 10% discount.  Kyle responds that we just want to look at the menu and he ups it to 15% discount. For example, a 15% discount isn’t all that helpful to this clan on a menu that is exclusively seafood.  The menu looks good and we end up eating outside with a heat lamp going.

The day has turned into an unfortunately more typical day with half the day doing the stuff we would normally do and half the day dealing with the Coronavirus fallout.

Yesterday, the WHO declared the Coronavirus a pandemic and it is causing us pandemic-like problems as we grapple with what to do. We awake to a news alert around 3 am that President Trump is banning commercial flights from Europe to the US for 30 days so we have 48 hours to repatriate to the US. Huh?  Didn’t Trump know we are just 9 months into our yearlong trip?   Coronavirus go away!  

A quick Orbitz search finds flights at $9,000 a pop from Paris to JFK and good luck finding 7 of them while being sick to your stomach at that price.  We are stuck between a killer virus stricken Europe and our own scrambling infected country with its growing number of cases, fear and panic. 

Egypt is on the fence so Kyle, Leanne and John call Memphis Tours (located in Memphis, Egypt not Memphis, Tennessee which wouldn’t make any sense). We work out a revision with them that we are going to switch to a private tour and we axe the Nile cruise and will drive in the private van from Aswan to Luxor.  This makes us feel a little better about getting on the plane tomorrow. 

Kyle has been going back and forth with the Albanian tour company.  We have booked a catamaran sailboat to sail around the Greek islands for a week leaving April 11th.  So if we can replace the exploded Middle East segment with Eastern Europe, we can drop into Greece and go sailing.  Then who knows. 

The tour company has sent Kyle an itinerary which looks really good but they did not address the cancellation aspect.  Kyle made it abundantly clear to them that everything has to be same-day, last minute cancellable in case the Coronavirus drives them fleeing from Eastern Europe. The documentation they sent just had the usual cancellation language; e.g. that you lose everything. So Kyle is still working on it while Leanne is not so sure on the Eastern European thing.  

Since we leave for Egypt tomorrow, we have exactly 7 days to sort out the pandemic problems and figure out where we will go on March 20th.