There’s something I never thought I’d say…
Yesterday Salajander said, “No plans survive first contact with the enemy. In this case our fantastic trip is the enemy.” Ha!
Let me rewind the a bit. Yesterday was the one week countdown. Very exciting! The day started with me checking our various booked hotels to see if any of the prices had dropped. Two of them had – significantly. Huzzah! What a great Monday…until I started looking at Tripadvisor to do some additional last minute research on the cities we are visiting. Our first destination is Bali and almost the entire first full page of discussion topics were related to Mount Agung. Now don’t get me wrong, we already knew about the volcanic activity because we got an email via the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (recommended highly joining), but reading the threads it sounded like it was getting significantly worse with an eruption imminent.
I am a project manager by profession. I like to be prepared and take a lot of the guess work out of a trip. But a) I didn’t even think about planning for a volcanic eruption, and b) I am discovering it’s quite hard to do so.
Of course we have insurance. We bought it months ago, thank goodness, as I’m seeing people on TA trying to figure out how to buy insurance now that the volcano is at a level 4 warning. So good on us for buying insurance. The bad thing is you can’t use the insurance until the volcano actually erupts. Which means that there is a high possibility we could be there when this happens.
Where we are staying is away from any of the dangerous areas, thank goodness. That’s not the problem. The problem would be the volcanic ash that could potentially shut down the airport and strand us in Bali. We chose to fly into Bali because that is where the private flight to our next destination is. I contacted the resort for destination two, but they said they are monitoring the situation and everything is still a go. Which is both good and bad, as it would have been nice to have been giving the option to change plans now, rather than if something happens trying to change plans during chaos.
This could very well end up being quite an exciting (not in a good way) start to the big vacation. I bought dust/fume masks yesterday on Amazon. Good grief. Stay tuned.
You can read up on what’s currently going on with the volcano here.
All first world problems aside, our thoughts and prayers are with the Balinese people, of whom I’ve only read good things. If this big fella erupts it would be devastating.
Neeners Travels 