So We Traveled...

Yes, we got on a plane and went somewhere. 

We just got back from a bit more than a week in Colorado and Utah. We couldn't take being at home anymore so we traveled. Having already cancelled two trips this spring, we elected to trade in our already planned week in California for about the same amount of time a little further east. Now we are back home. And it appears we are healthy and safe.

Considering we are still living in the midst of a global pandemic (hence the healthy and safe comment in the previous paragraph), you could make the case that this trip was reckless. You might say we didn't NEED to get on a plane, stay at a bunch of hotels and mingle with a bunch of strangers out west for eight days. We did it simply because we wanted to, because after being cooped up at home working remotely for about three months we had enough. You could also make the case that such a trip might put us and others at risk of contracting a virus that is out there and still not under control.

I'll accept all of that. Life is full of risks. And this is one we took but I do feel we did do a lot to distance ourselves from danger. In case there's someone else out there wrestling with this same dilemma, here are some strategies we used that we feel made our trip safer.

Yeah not taking a cab or Uber to the airport these days.

Ground Transportation

Unless we are flying out of town for five days or fewer, we typically take a Red Top Cab to either National or Dulles airport. But there was no way we were chancing close quarters in a cab with someone, even though I'm sure it would have been a fairly low risk activity. Instead, we drove and paid for parking, which can add up over eight plus days out of town. By switching our destination and using some frequent flyer miles, we ended up saving over $1,200 in cash. Why not use some of that to be a little safer and park within walking distance to the terminal? 

Totally worth it. A quick 25 or so minute ride out to Chantilly had us in Parking Garage 1 within walking distance of the terminal with pretty much nobody around us coming or going. The entire airport for that matter was pretty empty which made us feel way better about our decision to travel. It wouldn't be the same out west.

As luck would have it, we caught an additional break here. Dulles Airport dropped the price of parking right near the terminal to just $10 per day to allow people to park safely, which at $90 for a little more than eight days of parking ended up being cheaper than a $60+ cab ride each way anyway.

Flying

It may seem counterintuitive, but sitting on a plane for about four hours isn't actually that risky. I mean, after all, you are in a closed space with a bunch of strangers which might seem like an airborne petri dish. But the risks can be minimized. There are also a few ifs, most of which are out of your control. IF the airline provides masks to passengers. IF the passengers wear the masks. IF the airline intentionally caps capacity so only 2/3 of the seats are full. IF you don't get up and touch all sorts of surfaces and then touch your face. And IF someone who has the virus doesn't sit right next to you. If you can get all those ifs in place, you are in space with highly filtered air with more air changes per hour than most hospital wards.

There's one thing we did to maximize the chances of all those ifs coming true: flew Southwest. Early on in this pandemic, United Airlines made a big deal of blocking out middle seats to allow some distancing between customers, only to be later revealed they would only do that if there were few enough passengers booked to allow that to happen. But Southwest is deliberately capping capacity so nobody has to sit in a middle seat, in addition to providing masks to all flyers. Southwest is the best!

We did three other things to minimize risk: picked Denver deliberately because we could fly non-stop each way, used the overhead ventilator on full for the entirety of both legs of our journey and sat in the very last row. We figured we would only have to deal with bathroom traffic during the flight, there would be nobody behind us breathing our way and we'd avoid the inevitable crush and rush to get off the plane once the fasten seatbelt sign was turned off. And believe me, that crush did happen. So much for social distancing...

Emptiness. No issue social distancing here. 

The Itinerary

The plan for our trip to California was to spend some time exploring some of our National Parks before heading up to the Napa Valley for three days. When we moved away from that idea, we also moved completely to outdoor attractions. Colorado and Utah seemed like an ideal choice since we could basically spend every day outdoors seeing something new each day.

But we did a couple of other things to lower risk here. We stayed away from parks with historically high numbers of visitors on weekends in favor of long drives between places and parks with historically low numbers of visitors. This meant we hit Rocky Mountain National Park (4.7 million visitors last year), Arches National Park (1.6 million visitors in 2019) and Canyonlands National Park (733K visitors in 2019) on weekdays. We spent an entire Saturday driving between Denver and Moab, UT in our rental car by ourselves and spent the next day on Sunday at Hovenweep National Monument, which drew just 35,000 visitors last year, about what Rocky Mountain averages in three days, although attendance in the summer is way higher than that.

We also shifted our travel dates to allow this itinerary to work better, flying out on a Friday afternoon and coming back the following Saturday rather than Sunday. That meant instead of mingling with folks enjoying the weekend, we were traveling home. We could have stayed a day longer but why risk it?

Hotel room eats. OK at first but gets old. The sweet potato tots from Denver's Highland Tap & Burger were amazing.

Eating

One of our great loves when we travel is exploring the local food scene. We do our research ahead of time and find some great spaces with even better food and spend an hour plus eating and drinking after a full day of sightseeing. The ability to hang out and unwind before and during an excellent meal with a beer or two (or three...) is one of the joys of traveling. We skipped it entirely on this trip. Even in Utah, where from our perspective restaurants were fully open for business.

One of the highest risk activities we could identify during a weeklong National Parks-focused trip was spending time indoors with a bunch of people opening their mouths over and over to eat a meal while talking and expelling virus particles into the air. No way were we going to do that. We took almost (there were two exceptions) every meal we ate to go, whether it was grab and go breakfast from the hotel or a sandwich taken with us for lunch (we invested in a Yeti Daytrip Lunch Bag for this trip) or dinner to go from a restaurant.

Did that mean our culinary experience suffered? Honestly, yes. But we tried to find well-regarded places that were offering take out service of their regular menu or had shifted to provide a focused and excellent reduced menu. I think we ate some good food on this trip but the eating experience was not the same and some meals didn't stand up to the out of restaurant experience as well as others.

Mask off. Mask on.

Protection

After electing to drive ourselves to the airport; carefully selecting our airline; creating an agenda that was likely virus free; and then eating every meal away from other people we had to take some additional protection, right? Wipes to clean everything close to us on the plane and inside our rental car? Sure. Of course. And masks to wear everywhere? Yep, took those too.

We also took a few neck gaiters (or snoods, for those of you in England) so we could breathe a little easier through the thinner material in the middle of the desert during the day and still protect ourselves from random outdoor encounters with strangers, of which there were many each day. These things are also generally UPF 50+ rated to block at least 98% of the sun's UV rays which is smart in late June in southeast Utah.

Did all that make our trip 100% safe? Absolutely not. No way. Impossible to do. Life is really full of risks, even without a global pandemic. We figured after more than two months working at home, not seeing friends or family at all and going everywhere that we had to go on off hours with face coverings, a trip with layers of well-planned risk mitigation strategies would be safe enough. I think we were right.

Will we do this regularly? Nope. Not even close. But if we do it again anytime soon, you better believe we are doing everything we did on this trip to protect ourselves as much as we possibly can.

Blog posts to follow.

Flight to Denver. Not full at all.

52

Today is my 52nd birthday. If this isn't the most bizarre year I've spent on this planet, I'm not sure I want to know what's coming in the future. Although let's face it, this next year may be even stranger. I'm buckled in pretty tight for the next seven months or so at least.

The plan for year seven of this blog was pretty modest. Sometimes it happens that way. Our travel whims generally have about the same amount of travel in each calendar year but the distribution isn't necessarily spread out evenly between birthdays for me. That means some years between name days have more travel than other years. Year seven happened to be a light year by design. But not as light as it turned out to be.

We planned to complete four trips over the past year. I know. I know. That sounds like a lot. But only one of those four was planned to be a week in length. The other three were long weekends, either four days or five days away from home. A week plus in Ireland? Done. Lots of rain, but done. Long weekend in The Bahamas? Also done. Pirates and Goombay Smashes and beach time and rum cakes! Awesome! But the other two trips, to Costa Rica's Tortuguero National Park in March and northwest New Mexico in May, never happened. Cancelled! Victims of this global pandemic that is still very much out of control.

So understandably, this is not the birthday post I thought I'd be writing. If everything went according to plan (and we've already established that is very definitely not the case at all this year), not only would I have had time in Costa Rica and New Mexico under my belt, but I'd also be hoisting a beer in the cover photo of this post somewhere in central California after hiking among enormous trees in Kings Canyon National Park this very day. But that trip (planned for this entire week) didn't happen either.

But I am on the road. I'm out in Utah (of all places) on a plan B scenario that's worked out about as well as I could have hoped. It's incredible country out here and I'm excited to explore this place for the next few days before heading home. Given all that's happened over the past four months, I'm pretty excited about getting away for a week to some place this amazing.

Does all that mean year seven was a waste? Absolutely not!! Sure we lost a couple of long weekends in Costa Rica and New Mexico (we'll get there or back there one day) but we snorkeled and explored strange rock formations and played with swords and dug up some skeletons from the past that my native country tried to bury. Along the way we walked a lot and learned and found good food and great drinks, sometimes with music. We also got to travel with friends (or friend) which I love to do. I appreciate the fact that our friend Bryan came with us to Ireland. He definitely made that trip better for me. I love the perspective that other people bring to traveling. Hope we can do it again soon.

All that's not too shabby I'm thinking.

At Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. Cold, wet, windy but amazing just the same.

I've traditionally used my birthday post to write about how I'm doing on the goals I've committed to achieving and what my plans for the next year are. Let's not let a global pandemic affect that reckoning, shall we?

Year six of this blog saw me knocking off three of my five goals for my second five year period of exploring the world. Three of five! In one year!! Pretty darned good if I do say so myself. Continent number six? Check! Cologne? Check! Machu Picchu? Check!

How did I follow that success up this past year? Well...by accomplishing absolutely nothing on my list. Seriously. And it was deliberate. Really. Why rush things? I have three more years after this one and the only two outstanding promises I've made to myself is to visit the balance of the 50 states that I haven't set foot in (just four left, if you must know) and to make it to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Although honestly...this virus out there makes me want to rush a bit more. It's amazing how quickly something that you love so much can be taken from you. I mean that on many different levels.

So what's next? What does year eight hold? Honestly...I have no clue whatsoever. Yes, we have two trips planned already but there are absolutely no guarantees we are going on those or anywhere for the rest of this year and maybe beyond that. I think for the foreseeable future we are going to just remain flexible in our travel plans and open to any possibilities that present themselves. Particularly with the number of destinations that appear to be off limits to Americans considering we lead the entire planet in deaths from this pandemic. So proud!

I've read a lot about the future of travel in the last four months or so. Most of what I have read has suggested more planning is the way to go. Reservations for flights, restaurants and attractions are going to be more important than ever. We can't plan more. We regularly commit to travel plans a year or sometimes more ahead of time. I think for us the answer may actually be to commit later than we usually do and keep all our options open. Sounds counterintuitive but for us over-planners that might be the way to go. I will commit to providing a progress report a year from now.

No matter how it happens, it won't matter at all if we don't take care of ourselves. Throughout this duration of this pandemic, we are fortunate to have not known anyone to be seriously ill with this virus that's out there and I hope we can continue to be so lucky. I know there are so many who are not in the situation we are in. We'll keep pushing the envelope in a very very safe way to travel and explore where we can. Stay safe everyone. Happy birthday to me!

Our first view of New Providence island in The Bahamas. Pretty much paradise.