Adelaide Strikers and ACT Meteors star Katie Mack set to spend up to five months on the road

Mack left her Canberra home on July 12 for a six-week stint in England to play in the inaugural edition of The 100 - a 100-ball version of cricket likened to the franchise-world of the WBBL.

She returned to Australia and spent two weeks in quarantine in a Sydney hotel before shifting to Tasmania, where she is set to stay until she links up with her Adelaide Strikers teammates.

Given the ACT Meteors have no games on the horizon until after the Big Bash, Mack has opted to stay on the road but remains uncertain as to when she will head to Adelaide.

"I left on July 12. It's been about two months, and I probably won't get back to Canberra until the start of December or late November," Mack said.

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"It's a fair while, I would have obviously loved to have gone back to Canberra, but my family and my partner are in Sydney and there was no opportunity to see them anyway.

"I just finished my two weeks quarantine coming back from England, and I'm now in Tasmania. Just with the way Big Bash is looking and where Canberra is at the moment, there was going to be the chance I was going to have to do another two weeks' quarantine.

"It would have been about four weeks of strict quarantine in just over a month. In order to avoid that, I've just come to Tassie to bide a bit of time before the competition starts."

Mack has signed a one-year deal to return to the Strikers, where she will link up with Meteors teammate and former housemate Maddie Penna, who has earned a three-year deal with the club.

The WBBL marks the first instalment of women's cricket on the domestic calendar this season after the WNCL draw was reconfigured amid COVID-19 outbreaks.

A surge in cases has left players preparing for a potential return to a bubble for the Twenty20 league, similar to the one they were in for the WBBL last season.

"Last year we probably had the thought 'once we get through this year, it's going to go back to normal'," Mack said.

"To have another year where it's looking like there will be restrictions and we won't be able to play home and away games and have the crowds we want, it's going to be tough.

"Especially coming back from England when they had full crowds, it was pretty exciting. I kind of forgot what it felt like to play in front of a full crowd."

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