This gallery covers the period from just before covid hit in force in 2020 through to 2023.
It seems absolutely bizarre to me now that in February of 2020, amongst vague news of some new virus in China, I was in Melbourne airport waiting to board a plane to the USA. After 2 weeks in Philadelphia and 1 week in San Francisco I returned to Melbourne, narrowly avoiding mandatory quarantine, and into to a very different world. Just 3 weeks after that we had pulled our kids from school and I was no longer working from our CBD office, choosing instead to work from home full time. Just a couple of weeks after that Melbourne was in full mandated lock-down. For those not from Victoria AU, we had some very strict lock-downs during during that time.
As I left the San Francisco conference tensions amongst some were high, but others were more relaxed about the situation. I’m sure none of us quite grasped what was about to unfold across the world.
I had some free time on that trip, and hired a bike to cycle over the Golden Gate bridge, which was an awesome activity.
The Matrix Resurrections was filming at the time, and the cast was staying at the same hotel as my conference. It was fun to see the actors “up close”, or at least as close as their security would allow. I saw a little bit of the filming one night from afar at a nearby church, and to this day I have no idea which part of the movie they were fimling there.
I don’t have a lot of images for those 4 years post COVID. There were a couple of local holidays during the quieter non-lockdown times, a few days spent in a eerily quiet locked down Melbourne CBD so I could remote attend an overseas conference from our office (Communications workers were classified as essential workers, so I was able to get a permit to be outside of home for that time). Another trip to Philadelphia and New York followed once things had calmed down a little, and I returned to San Francisco once more.
Those post-COVID conference trips were spent uncomfortably wearing masks to protect everyone, despite this I was lucky enough to stay healthy throughout, ironically instead catching COVID at home during an over-seas conference I chose not to attend for risk of catching COVID.
