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IS IT TOO LATE TO FLY HOME??? | Van Life in a Global Pandemic

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A van, a dog, and a closing window to get out of South America before the borders lock for good.

By late March 2020, Trent Childs and Allie Elwell had built a following documenting van life across South America, rolling their customized camper through borders that were now slamming shut one by one. Their video, “IS IT TOO LATE TO FLY HOME??? | Van Life in a Global Pandemic,” lays out the exact moment they realized the slow-motion outbreak they’d been tracking from the road had turned into a full-blown scramble for the last flights out. Alongside their dog Frank, the couple weighed a decision with no good option: fly now and abandon the van, or stay put and risk getting sealed off entirely.

• Trent Childs and Allie Elwell, traveling with their dog Frank, were overlanding through South America in a customized camper van when COVID-19 escalated into a global pandemic in March 2020.
• Commercial flights were disappearing and international borders were closing with little warning, forcing the couple to confront whether they’d already missed their window to fly home to the U.S.
• Leaving meant finding secure long-term storage for the van and their belongings in a foreign country and clearing strict airline pet rules for Frank; staying risked isolation, closed campsites, and being stranded behind sealed borders.

A Slower Start That Caught Up Fast

Early on, the outbreak in parts of South America appeared to be moving at a different pace than what was already unfolding in Europe and North America. That gap gave Childs and Elwell a false sense of runway. But the video captures how quickly that changed, with case counts climbing and governments across the continent moving from advisories to hard lockdowns and grounded transit routes in a matter of days.

That compressed timeline is what turned a manageable travel decision into an emergency one. The couple’s dilemma wasn’t unique among overlanders at the time — plenty of people living out of vehicles or boats found themselves recalculating in real time as the routes home narrowed, a scramble echoed by other travelers who suddenly had to catch and cook from isolation rather than keep moving as planned.

The Calculus of Flying Now

Getting home immediately meant solving three problems at once: securing seats on commercial flights that were vanishing by the day, arranging secure long-term storage for a fully outfitted camper van and everything in it in a country they didn’t live in, and clearing airline pet policies for Frank, who couldn’t simply be left behind or shipped separately without paperwork and time they didn’t have.

Waited too long to try and return home.

Every one of those logistics carried its own deadline, and none of them lined up neatly. Storing a van isn’t like parking a rental car — it meant trusting a stranger or a facility with a vehicle that was also their only home, in a country where the rules for foreigners were changing daily right alongside the border closures.

The Cost of Staying on the Road

The alternative wasn’t simple either. Remaining in South America risked real isolation: campsites shutting down, supply runs getting harder as towns restricted movement, and the possibility of being stuck indefinitely once national borders sealed completely. For a couple used to the freedom of van life, the pandemic flipped that freedom into a liability — the same mobility that let them chase new places also meant they had no fixed base to shelter in if things got worse.

That tension is the spine of the video: the fear of flying too soon and losing the van versus the fear of waiting and losing the ability to leave at all. It’s the same bind that hit other travelers documenting life on the water and in remote camps during the same stretch of March 2020, from sailors improvising in isolation to hikers and campers cutting trips short as facilities closed around them.

Frank, the Van, and the Deadline That Wouldn’t Wait

Frank’s status as a passenger, not just a pet, runs through the whole decision. Airline pet regulations don’t bend for a global emergency, and figuring out whether he could fly with them, in what class of cabin, and on which carrier added another layer to an already collapsing timeline. Every hour spent sorting that out was an hour the flight options kept shrinking.

Childs and Elwell’s video ends without a clean resolution — it’s a document of the deliberation itself, made while the outcome was still unknown. That’s the value of it: a real-time record of what it looked like for people living out of a van to watch the exits close around the world in real time, with a dog, a rig full of belongings, and a plane ticket that might not exist by the time they decided to buy it.