Quick Thoughts After Getting Home From Our First Post-COVID Trip

by joeheg

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Sharon and I took a few days off from writing posts for the website. No worries, we’re fine. It’s just that we headed out of town for a few days and decided this would be as good of a time as any to take a short break from writing articles. It would allow us to fully enjoy our first time away since we’ve been staying at home because of COVID-19.

Honestly, we’ve been staunchly in the #stayhome #staysafe camp from day one of the global pandemic. So why did we take a multi-day trip from home?

The best reason I can give is a risk-mitigation strategy. We didn’t want to stay home forever but we also weren’t going to be one of the people who feel travel is necessary and the risks are low so we can pretend COVID-19 isn’t happening.

We still think there is a risk when leaving our house so we planned a trip that met our tolerance level. This meant we did things we wouldn’t do on a normal vacation.

  • We drove 9 hours each way to our location instead of flying.
  • We rented a cabin from Airbnb instead of staying at a hotel.
  • We took a trip to a location we would have never visited otherwise.
  • Our entire trip had a contingency plan depending on whether or not safety measures were being used.
  • We were ready to scrap the trip if we got too uncomfortable.

We’re back home from the trip and what did we think? It was a great long weekend and it fit our requirements. We’re already thinking about how we’d be able to take the things we’ve learned this trip to make another trip this fall.

It makes Sharon and me happy that we can travel again, but there’s someone who’s not thrilled.

Our kennel/vet sent us a picture of Dobby the Poodle who is wondering when we’re getting back home because we’ve been with her every night since March.

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Don’t worry baby girl, you’ll be back home tomorrow. Of course, that’s until we have our next trip in October.

#stayhealthy #staysafe #washyourhands #wearamask

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

1 comment

Renee F August 28, 2020 - 9:26 am

We did the same thing, drove to Colorado from PA as we are trying to do the National Parks, wore masks all the time, washed hands, social distanced, reminded those of social distance. Disinfected our food or cooked (we camped for half of the trip), ordered take away. Disinfected each hotel room from the door to the windows, only stayed in rooms where there was a room AC unit not central air for the entire hotel. It was a lot but it was nice to not see the same four walls and get to see the big blue sky and stars at night. We are back home, prepared to hunker down for the next 6 months again.

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