What's it like when you can't even go out to the shops or walk your dog for two weeks? Is there an upside to being confined to your property?

The Courier-Sun spoke to four locals - Noam Blat, Opal Pastro, and Bob and Gwynneth Denner - about their experience of being compulsorily quarantined at home after returning from an overseas trip.

Musician Noam Blat left in December to perform at concerts in Europe, spend Christmas Day in Paris with his daughter, and celebrate his 50^th birthday in Israel with his family.

He found being quarantined in Bellingen much easier to bear than the journey back to Australia, which he described as "pretty hairy".

"I planned to be away another month and a half," Noam said. "But three weeks ago it became clear it was going to be tricky to get back.

"My birthday was on March 17 and I wanted to stay for that, so I gambled and I picked a flight that left on the 19th.^"

The trip was long and stressful, with stops in Turkey, Athens and Qatar.

"The boards were full of flights that had been cancelled, and in fact one of my flights was cancelled, but I managed to get a ticket with another airline," Noam said.

"When I was in Qatar, there was no personnel at the airport so I couldn't get my boarding pass for the next flight. The machine that was meant to do that for me was broken and there was no one to talk to.

"Eventually someone just put me on the plane. It was very, very close, I almost missed that flight."

He said some of the flights were almost empty.

"I had a whole section of the plane to myself. I experienced what it was like having a private jet."

Arriving in Sydney at night after a journey that took 35 hours instead of the usual 23, Noam found hotels were loath to offer him accommodation because he had just come off an international flight.

Fortunately, he ended up being able to stay in a friend's unoccupied Airbnb and the next day he caught the train home, wearing a mask.

Friends had stocked his fridge and pantry and he was very glad to be back in Bellingen.

Asked what he was most looking forward to doing when he emerged on Sunday April 5, Noam said, "Getting out and going for a walk in the bush."

But he certainly hasn't hated his time in isolation.

"I've been singing and playing, learning new material, spending a few hours every day playing my guitar. It's been wonderful, actually."

Opal Pastro flew back to Australia from Germany on March 17 and she and her husband have just finished two weeks of quarantine.

Friends kept them supplied with food and a kindly neighbour walked their dog every morning.

Opal made her first foray into town on Wednesday and found it "very different".

"Everything was quiet. It's all a bit sombre because there's so many shops closed with their little notices saying sorry about that," Opal said.

"But it was ordered and calm. In the IGA, I was expecting things to be a bit manic but there was hardly any people in there and everyone was keeping their distance."

Although she's a visual artist, Opal didn't turn to creative pursuits to keep herself occupied.

"We did those jobs that are in the back of your mind that you're going to do someday but you never do," she said.

"I've started doing all the digitisation of our old family photographs, scanning them and putting them onto my google drive. I'm about a third of the way through that.

"It was something that I thought of doing when we had the bushfire threat earlier on in the year. But it's a very big job."

They also signed up to the NBN, embarked on a major spring clean and started a vegetable garden.

Large jigsaw puzzles proved to be a good time-filling challenge: "We're on our second 500-piece puzzle, and the next one we've been lent is a 1000 pieces."

Opal has also been doing the online FitBods classes run by Tracy Young.

"It's a bit different, but I didn't want to lose my fitness, because then you start getting a bit depressed. I set up my laptop out on our veranda and me and the dog do our fitness class."

She said the days go quickly when you can find one little activity to do after another.

"I just wanted to be really constructive in this time. We're sort of hunkering down for the long haul."

Bob and Gwynneth Denner finished their isolation on March 28 but said they found it disconcerting being out in public again.

"We went down into Dorrigo to get some groceries," Gwynneth said. "People had told us that you had to stay a metre and a half apart from everyone else and that they were only letting a few in [the supermarket] at a time, but when we experienced it, it just felt really weird."

Instead of being able to greet friends and acquaintances warmly as they normally would, they had to stand back and either talk loudly across the gap or not talk much at all.

They'd gone to Europe on March 3, on a holiday to celebrate Gwynneth's 80^th birthday, visiting Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria and Italy.

They were also meant to do a eight-day Mediterranean cruise, but that part had to be abandoned.

Like Noam and Opal, they didn't mind their quarantine period.

They did lots of clearing out and cleaning (even the skirting boards) and applied themselves to projects that have been on the backburner for ages.

"Things like putting the last 50 years of my life into a photograph album," Bob said.

"And I've been writing my life story," Gwynneth said. "My girls asked me to do it ten years ago and because I turned 80 this year I thought I'd better get on with it."

They watched lots of Downton Abbey but rationed their dose of news, permitting themselves just one radio bulletin (ABC) and one TV news program (SBS) per day.

"We just didn't want to have all the doom and gloom and negativity pile up on us," Bob said.

"We're trying to stay very positive through all this," Gwynneth said. "We'll obey all the rules and we've pretty much isolated ourselves anyway, but I don't think we need to be told that in some countries, people in their 80s aren't being treated."

A late afternoon chat on the phone with a group of friends in Brisbane that's been dubbed the Happy Hour also kept their spirits up.

"They ring and we chat about our day, what we've been doing, a little bit of politics or a bit of humour," Bob said.

Their network of local friends enjoyed helping out during the quarantine, keeping them provisioned with food and walking their dog.

"Some of them were disappointed that we'd come out," Bob said.

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