We all know how much coronavirus has affected people’s ability to fly from place to place. International flights are nearly gone, and even domestic flights are greatly curtailed. I think most people’s interest in flying is probably at an all-time low, anyway, due to health safety concerns.
That still leaves driving as an option, but with so many states mandating quarantines once you’ve arrived, it makes road trips even that much less enticing, depending on a person’s individual circumstances.
However, sometimes you just have no choice. And if that’s the case, driving from one state to another is still a viable option. However, as you can imagine, things are different from what we’re used to if you drive across the country right now.
Chris Quintana is the Education Enterprise Reporter for USA Today. After living in Washington D.C. for the past 3 years, he recently made the decision to drive back home to New Mexico, to help his mother and two younger brothers after the recent and unexpected death of his stepfather.
The 3-day trek was apparently like none he had ever taken before.
Click here to read Chris’s story.
His story was posted on USA Today.
My Thoughts
My own personal driving experience in the past 4 weeks has generally been to the supermarket and back. The round-trip ride is about 2 miles. However, I got to go to my general practitioner today for a follow-up visit, and he’s about 14 miles from our house. I had to drive on I-4 and it was an I-4 like none I’ve ever seen. We’re still under a statewide “stay-at-home” orders, save for work, medical appointments and other “essential” reasons (like WWE matches??? Yay Flori-DUH) so hardly anybody was on the road. If you’ve ever been to central Florida, you know that just doesn’t happen! So it gave me a small flavor of what Chris went through.
As I read Chris’s story, it reminded me of the conversation I had with my friends, “Karla” and “Jeff.” They’re the couple who were stuck on a “healthy” cruise ship for 3 weeks until they were finally allowed to disembark in San Diego. Karla has some issues with her immune system, so they were very conflicted about taking a plane from San Diego to their home in Florida. She had heard stories of planes with next to no one on them, as well as nearly full planes – and the last thing she wanted was, understandably, to sit next to someone who was COVID positive. But on the other hand, it was in the earlier days of counties and states “locking down,” and my friends were genuinely concerned if they would find hotels, gas stations, restaurants, etc. open during their cross-country drive. They decided flying was the lesser of two evils, but based on Chris’s account, it sounds like they probably could have driven and been OK. 20/20 hindsight, huh?
If you find yourself having to drive to another state, you might want to have a useful reference of what’s at the next exit (or next few exits), so you can try to call before you get there. This post has several reliable ones.
#stayhealthy #stayathome #washyourhands
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
3 comments
You seem to often go out of your way to take political pot shots at your home state and its governance. Even in an article that’s ostensibly about someone else driving across the US, never touching Florida.
I get it: It’s your blog and your right to say whatever the heck you want. My only question is: have you ever thought about maybe moving to a state that you might actually like?
I enjoy living in Florida. But not everything is that black and white. There are lots of things I wish were better.
Things can be good but there is always room for improvement, right?
Especially when really stupid decisions are being made during a pandemic. Like saying churches can hold services. And the WWE is “essential.”
Wanting things to be better in a place doesn’t mean there’s a reason to leave; just that one can think it can be better. I’m certainly not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though.
I spend a lot of time in Jacksonville and I hate it, I’m sick of it. They are reopening hte beaches in a couple days though. But I call it hillbilliy town, full of hillbillies who think they know everything but make it impossible for you to run a real business. One of my board members lives in JAX and he is the biggest hillbilly of all and makes my life miserable. That is why I have to spend so much time in JAX. So I’m glad it’s shut down so I don’t have to visit hillbilly Rick and listen to his dumb ideas.