✈️Don’t Travel During a Pandemic: Getting Home Just in Time: Episode 5

The Best Travel Tip During a Global Disaster: Don’t Travel

There’s a moment when travel stops being exciting and starts feeling urgent.

Episode 5 captures that exact moment — when the world shifted from business as usual to how do we get home before everything shuts down?

In this episode of On the Bar Fly, we tell the story of navigating international travel as borders closed, flights vanished, and uncertainty became the only constant.

The trip wasn’t spontaneous. It was planned months in advance — part of our normal travel rhythm — with stops in Bangkok and Sydney. Then the pandemic hit, and the entire plan unraveled almost overnight.

What followed was a fast-moving scramble:

• Constantly changing flight schedules

• Routes disappearing in real time

• Border closures looming by the hour

• Stress levels climbing with every news update

Every decision felt high-stakes. Do we wait? Reroute? Cancel? Push forward? The pressure wasn’t just about travel — it was about timing it just right.

Against the odds, we made it home in time. Or so we thought.

Because getting home wasn’t the end of the story.

Lockdowns began. Quarantine became reality. And our vehicle — still overseas — sat in another country for weeks, quietly collecting parking fees while the world hit pause.

Stan Note

Travel teaches flexibility. Global disasters teach humility.

🌍 Why This Episode Matters

Episode 5 isn’t just a travel story — it’s a snapshot of a moment in history. It captures what it felt like to move through airports as they emptied, to make plans with incomplete information, and to realize that sometimes the smartest travel advice is the simplest:

Stay put.

🌍 International travel during COVID✈️ Racing home before lockdown😬 Stress, uncertainty & survival stories

If you’ve ever traveled during a crisis — or wondered what it was like to be mid-journey as the world shut down — this episode will hit home.

👉 Listen to Episode 5 of On The Bar Fly

👉 Explore more travel reality stories

👉 Or check out our lessons learned the hard way on the road

Pull up a stool. This one’s real. 🍻