It's about one month since my last post (March 1st) and lots has changed in the world.
When we arrived to Lisbon, there were 0 (zero) confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Portugal and we were all but present about the impact of what we just observed in "other countries". Just a few days in, the numbers started to climb in Portugal as they did all over the world, and at the time of writing this post, Portugal has 10,524 total cases.
We stayed in Lisbon until end of March and had then to make a decision of extending our stay or moving as planned to our next destination (near Sesimbra), which is just a 30min car drive south of Lisbon, still in Portugal. This decision wasn't an easy one as we really wanted to avoid moving. We booked that second Airbnb back in January based on its location outside of the city, close to nature as well as the southern coast line being in walking distance.
When we embarked on our slow traveling journey as digital nomads at the end of February, we were totally ok with heading off into the unknown, leaving everything behind. This time however, the decision to move on to the next destination felt really hard, despite it being just a small move.
We were supposed to move at the end of March, but postponed the move initially for a week to not fall into the period of the "state of emergency", declared by the Portuguese government on March 19th. At the beginning of this week, we received a message from the Airbnb host of the next destination, informing us that the "state of emergency" will most likely be extended with the expectation of some additional measures which might make the move from Lisbon harder or impossible. He suggested that we should think about moving earlier (before Thursday) if we still would wanted to move at all.
We sat down for a few hours, discussing the pros and cons and eventually decided to go for it. What made that decision so much harder compared with other much larger decisions (like giving up everything in London to become digital nomads) was the fear of moving (being exposed) and committing to a longer stay (nobody really know what's going to happen over forseeable future) at a location that we knew not much about. On top of that, we don't even know how long we can actually stay at this second destination, as there are existing bookings from mid May, although it's likely that those will be canceled.
Normally that would be totally fine as we stay for a while and move then on, but this time it felt like we wouldn't know how long we would stay at that next location. The infrastructure in terms of supermarkets as well as the proximity to nature was theoretically so much better than we had in Lisbon, but at least we knew what we had in Lisbon, even there was just a small butcher, a few mini markets and a bakery nearby.
This is basically fear of the unknown, deeply ingrained in everyone, which causes most people to be comfortable being uncomfortable, like working in jobs that they hate, staying in relationships that don't work, being sick from living an unhealthy lifestyle, etc.
Anyway, we finally moved last Tuesday, making today the 4th day here at our second destination, which we are super happy to have decided for. Their are 3 larger super markets just 5 min down the street and being just minutes from the wast green area of "Parque Natural da Arrábida" is a really great area to spend an extended period of time at.
Song listened while writing this post: Lovely by Joey Pecoraro