When Newcastle woman Rebecca Morley-John, her husband Ben and their then five-month-old son Teddy set off for New Zealand in June of 2021 for a getaway, they had no idea they wouldn't get home for nearly four months.
The young family, who lives in Sydney, had travelled to Auckland to stay with Ben's Kiwi parents so Teddy could meet his grandparents.
Rebecca says the getaway was a spur-of-the-moment decision - she recalls throwing a few pairs of tights into a bag, bundling up her baby and making the trans-Tasman trip.
"Now, I can't even look at those clothes," she laughs.
Rebecca, who was on maternity leave, and Ben, who runs his own company, were coming to the end of their 10 days away when things took a turn for the worst.
It was the height of the Delta outbreak of COVID, and NSW's COVID numbers were skyrocketing. At the time, then-NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian called it the "scariest period" since the pandemic began.
Then Rebecca and Ben received a generic email from the airline alerting them their flight home to Sydney had been cancelled.
So they booked another flight, and it was cancelled too: the NSW government had tightened the tap of international arrivals to a trickle, with just 750 people allowed to pass through Sydney Airport each week.
Meanwhile, Australia's vaccine rollout - famously declared "not a race" by then-prime minister Scott Morrison - was tripped up by the bad press circulating about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Rebecca and Ben decided to get vaccinated in New Zealand while they continued their efforts to book a flight home, which took on a sort of grab-that-rock-concert ticket quality.
"It was like when we were at university, and we'd all wait by the computer for our classes to open up so we could get the one we wanted," Rebecca says.
But for every plane ticket successfully booked, a perfunctory email would arrive days after, alerting them the flight had been cancelled.
Finally in September, after paying $200 for a round of PCR tests, the trio made it onto a plane home to Sydney. There were only 30 other passengers on the eerie flight, Rebecca says.
When they landed in Sydney, they went straight into hotel quarantine. Their accommodation wasn't exactly fit for purpose for a young family - it was a studio with a separate bathroom.
Meanwhile, Teddy was showing no signs of slowing down - he was rapidly outgrowing his clothes, and had even started to crawl.
"There's never a minute that goes longer than when you're trying to keep your child entertained," Rebecca says with a laugh.
She and Ben usually ate dinner hiding under the covers, she remembers, as Teddy slept soundly next to them.
On day 13 of their quarantine, the weary couple were readying to go home to their apartment in Sydney when Rebecca received a phone call. She had tested positive for COVID-19.
She asked for genomic sequencing, which found her result was a Sydney-based strain - meaning she had picked it up during her hotel quarantine stint, possibly from the security passing food through the door.
It was a gut punch. She was given a choice: either go into another two weeks of quarantine alone, or she, Ben and Teddy quarantine together, them as close contacts.
Ben and Rebecca, who was still breastfeeding, realised they were in for another two weeks of quarantine - initially in a medical quarantine facility, but later in her apartment, after police signed off on their request to - at long last - go home.
Walking into her home for the first time in late September, nearly four months after leaving for a 10-day trip, was surreal. She was still in quarantine, but isolating at home felt luxurious compared to the previous three months.
Finally, as October ticked over, the family was free to go.
Looking back now, her pandemic roller-coaster story brings up mixed emotions for her.
On the one hand, it was wonderful to get the support of Ben's parents during that time, who had a home with a backyard and helped out with the care of Teddy.
And at least the couple didn't have to cook or run a household at all during their quarantine, she laughs.
On the other hand, her heart broke for the months of Teddy's life that were passing by - items of clothing sitting in folded in drawers back in Sydney that he had long grown out of, and her plans for his early learning and development put on indefinite hold.
"I left with a baby and I came home with a toddler," she says.
The other maddening thing for her and Ben? The goal posts continually moving backwards, she says.
"Every time we thought we had an endpoint - that we had a flight booked, or we were coming to the end of quarantine - something happened that stopped us from going home," Rebecca says.
Soon it'll be a great dinner party story, she concedes. One small story in a larger story where our lives were put on hold, shuttled off course or changed forever by the COVID-19 pandemic.
