Don’t Know If International Travel Will Happen? Make A “Plan B”

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Joe and I have had plans to go to Japan in 2020 for a good 2 or 3 years now. We were initially going to go to the Olympics and then see more of the country from there. Smarter minds eventually prevailed (we’d probably get stuck with tickets for a sport we don’t want to see, Japan is oppressively hot and humid in the summer, the entire country was going to be mondo crowded, etc.), we decided to not go to/for the Olympics, and to go to Japan in November instead.

And then coronavirus hit.

The Olympics were postponed for a year, so it’s just as well that we changed those plans. But frankly, I’m not thinking that anyone will be doing a whole lot of international travel by November. Or if we can, how safe we’d feel about it.

Who knows if it’s rightly or wrongly yet, but I’ve already considered the trip to be a wash; we’ll put it off until November 2021. Joe isn’t quite as ready to give it up, but he’s realistic enough to agree that we may as well make some alternate plans that are hopefully more realistic.

We’re planning a Plan B. This is what it looks like.

Joe already has the vacation time approved. We would typically just put it back into the bank. Still, we’ve already canceled or stopped planning 4 out of our 5 trips from now through the summer (one cruise, in mid-July, currently isn’t canceled. Lots of factors will go into whether or not we actually go on it, although in the end, we probably won’t) so he’s already got a lot of vacation time banked. We figure if he’s going to take the time, we may as well do something, assuming we can.

We don’t want to plan anything on a plane because really, who knows what aviation is going to look like 6 or 7 months from now? So we figure we’ll do a 2-week road trip of the southeast.

We’ve already mentioned that sometimes we’ll go places simply to connect with family and friends and although said family and friends don’t even know about this yet, that’s what we plan to do (albeit with some add-ons as listed below).

• We’ve got cousins in northern Florida
• We’ve got another cousin who lives in Georgia
• We have friends who live in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Louisiana

So what if we drove around from state to state, saw everybody, and managed to see some sites, too? Like maybe:

• St. Augustine
• World of Coca Cola
• CNN Studios (I don’t care about CNN so much as I want to see where The World of Sid and Marty Krofft had been. We ALMOST went when I was a kid!)
• Savannah
• South of The Border (yes, AGAIN!)
• Nashville
• Dollywood
• The Lost Sea Adventure (we’ve tried to go to this twice and it never worked out)
• The Biltmore
• New Orleans

We probably wouldn’t get to everything but that’s OK; we’d get to see at least some of them. And we’d be able to see lots of friends and family, too.

So that’s our Plan B. If Japan doesn’t work out, we’ll be a little disappointed that we have to wait a year, but I think our alternate plans will work out just fine!

Do you have any Plan Bs ready if Plan A doesn’t work in the next few months?

#stayhealthy #stayathome #washyourhands

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary