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A Small Island got the Pandemic Right

What a small island can teach the rest of us

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Long before the pandemic hit, I had booked a sabbatical from my work for the entire year of 2021. My wife was on mat leave with our second kid. We had a small window of time off altogether. 90 days.

I would be damned before I would let some worldwide pandemic get in the way of that.

In the years leading up, we imagined going as far across the world as possible. New Zealand, Australia, Thailand. As I’m sure you can guess, the possibilities went from endless to hopeless.

This was pre-vaccine. The whole thing was a dice roll. People were getting stuck in countries, stuck in airports. Honestly, it was pretty selfish, naïve, and stubborn of us to push through all of that. The likely deserved stress and anxiety that came with making these decisions was felt heavily.

We had saved up some money to pull this off and really only had one shot at it. The airlines in Canada, like everywhere else, were offering very limited destinations which narrowed the list down drastically.

Cancun, Heathrow, Kingston, and Bridgetown. That was it. Knowing basically nothing about Barbados and having never even had it on my radar of places that interested me…