I noticed it in January. Business slowed down in my Travel Store as people began to stop flying into or via China, then Italy and the rest of Europe, and in February cruising took a hit. By March, those who work in the travel industry were round-eyed in wonder at the magnitude of what was happening.
No one needed luggage and neck pillows and packing cells, nor the footrest hammocks that had been going gang busters up until then. When a new shipment of the little foot hangers arrived in May I rolled my eyes and put them on the shelf. Like a spinster they sit alongside compression socks and travel wallets, awaiting the courtship of long haul flights and the romance of holiday planning to far off lands to begin again.
My travel blog, one of the largest in NZ and listed in the top 20 in the world, became all about New Zealand content.
Pivot became the buzz word. So while the government paid out a subsidy and my friends and family were baking and doing deep cleans of ovens and skirting boards, I made gin and wrote a children’s book. In that order!”
Lucy Lou Beats the Coronavirus is my lockdown baby, written for 2- to 6-year-olds as a time capsule of those days. The time when we learned about social-distancing, bubbles and hand washing. It’s a rhyming story about Lucy Lou and her family who go on a social-distancing walk in their family bubble and come upon coronavirus sitting on a park bench, and what they do to get rid of it.
It’s a 28-page illustrated book that takes the scary out of this unseen virus for little ones by putting a face on it. Even the face is not very scary and when it flies through the air and is gone on the last page, it is a tool to help the smallest among us know what to do.
So while we wait for international travel to take off again (see what I did there?), my aspiration is to go on a library reading tour. Lucy Lou and me, embracing the pivot.
Megan Singleton owns bloggeratlarge.com and the travelstore.co.nz. She is now also a published author and Lucy Lou is available for purchase online in the Travel Store. Megan is also the Newstalk ZB Sunday travel correspondent.
