Do You Want To Travel Somewhere? Anywhere?

By Erica and Karen

Are you tired of the place you call home? Do you yearn to go somewhere else, at least for a few days? If you prepare carefully, and perhaps think outside the usual travel boxes, you can.

First, decide where you want to go. Local, by car? Further away, by plane? We would travel on some airlines but many people will not, just yet.

Then check out the restrictions. Some places, like the EU, restrict most travel from the U.S. Others, like many states with in the U.S., have reciprocal quarantine requirements that make short trips unfeasible. But some jurisdictions are getting creative. Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and New York are talking about efforts to ease travel and create incentives to travel among them. Some countries are considering creating bubbles to permit travel among them as well, as are some cities, like New York and London. But none of this is easy.

Once you choose a destination, think about travel strategies.

• Obviously, you need to prepare more carefully than you might have Before COVID—where will you stop for food, what kind of place will you stay in, do you want stay in campsites or motels or swank hotels.

• Consider a cross-country road trip. Karen’s daughter is doing just that, camping in the back yards of friends’ houses, and in Walmart parking lots. But she is braver than her mother.

• Have a look at these photos before you go. Or if you just want to go virtual.

• How about company? You know yourself. Are you happy to travel completely alone? Might be difficult to meet people these days. If you do a road trip, do you really plan to drive all by yourself? That is tiring. Bring along some good audiobooks. We recommend Ron Chernow’s Grant. It might get you all the way across the country and back. Or William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.

• And check out this website. According to a Portrait of American Travelers study, 64% of women cited safety as their top consideration in deciding a destination. Here is a guide to help women budget and save for their travels while informing them about extra safety precautions with the pandemic.

• Maybe you want to travel with friends or family. That always needs careful thought. Again, especially now.

• If traveling with friends or family seems risky, and traveling alone seems lonely, consider traveling with a total stranger. Yes, that sounded goofy to us, too, but this story made it seem appealing, provided the stranger was a good match as a travel companion.

• Maybe you just want to relocate for a while. How about setting up a remote office in Aruba? Working from home would be delightful if home were temporarily the beach.

• If traveling now seems too complicated and dangerous, you can always plan something for the future. We read the itinerary for this trip to Iceland to see the Northern Lights and almost felt as if we had been there. Maybe by February we could be. Maybe we are hallucinating.

And while you are waiting you can share a virtual trip with your friends. We were amused at the travelogue created by these women when their vacation was cancelled. They must have felt at least a little bit as if they had been away. And they sure look as if they had fun.

If that is too much work, you can always see a movie that beautifully portrays a place you would love to visit, and you can fantasize about going there with one of your favorite actors. Here’s a great list.

What are we doing? For now we are staying local. A trip to Massachusetts. Maybe a trip to a local winery. But we long to get on a plane and go somewhere utterly different. So we will keep planning, and preparing, and doing a little fantasy voyaging while we wait.