Will We Ever Travel Again?
Traveling is a passion of mine. When I was growing up on Long Island, I never traveled outside the U.S. Family vacations were to Florida or Atlantic City or anywhere that had casinos. I think we went to the Bahamas a few times. Nothing too memorable.
When I graduated college, I went straight into the workforce and built a local entertainment publication from the ground up. I didn’t get to do the semester abroad or the gap year after college. It made me long to travel even more.
When I finally got the chance at the age of 24, I squeezed in a couple of weeks during the summer to Israel and Greece with my buddy Dan. Seeing and experiencing the different cultures, the unique gastronomy, and the party scenes in places like Tel Aviv, Athens, and Ios flipped a switch in me that left an insatiable thirst for more travel.
The following summer, I traveled alone to London, Amsterdam, and back to Ios to meet up with a friend of a friend who I met on the Greek island the year before. While I spent that whole year working on the magazine in Atlanta, he spent it living on a kibbutz in Israel. I learned a couple of things on that trip. One was that I really didn’t like traveling alone. I didn’t have the self-confidence my son has, nor did we have the technology to meet like-minded individuals with a trumped up bio on a social platform. I was relieved to find my friend back in Ios since we hadn’t actually communicated at all between the two summers (this was way before even flip phones).
I returned to Atlanta that summer and enjoyed the hell out of the Olympics the following year where the whole world came to visit me. My friend from Ios took a completely different path, returned to Israel to study the Torah, and eventually became an Orthodox rabbi. It was quite a contrast from the Ios party guy that I had known. That was the other thing I learned- how much people can change in such a short amount of time.
But two-week summer trips to Cuba, Canada, the Cayman Islands and Sydney, Australia weren’t enough for me. When I was ready to leave Atlanta, I connived my girlfriend at the time into traveling around the world in the year 2000 to celebrate my 30th birthday. It was a whirlwind of a ten month trip which began at the MOMs New Year’s Party in New Orleans and ended with six weeks back in Sydney for the Olympics.
When we settled back down, we chose New Orleans because it was the city that brought us together. It was our common bond. We married a year later and had kids immediately after. Courtney was three months pregnant on our honeymoon in Brazil, which ended up being our last trip abroad (not including a couple of extended-family vacations to the Caribbean) for seventeen years. Having three kids and a restaurant wasn’t exactly an easy way to travel.
Then Covid struck and the itch burned inside us once again. We didn’t want our kids to grow up like I did, with a myopic view of the world. So we hatched a plan to do what virtually no one else was doing- travel the world. On the surface, it seemed like a good plan. Europe was tackling the virus better than we were. Aside from the difficulties of entering the E.U., most countries were already out of lockdown by the summer and enjoying a much less regulated pandemic. Things looked rosy overseas.
And it was rosy for a while. Londoners walked the streets without masks, restaurants and pubs full of rambunctious twenty-somethings. Croatians encouraged European travelers to enjoy their beaches and Roman ruins. Even in Portugal, the rules were different in each city and we were mostly left to use our own judgement on when and where to be safe.
But now we are in Spain where masks are compulsory and mandated by heavily armed police walking the streets. Pubs and restaurants have last call at 9pm and a country-wide curfew just went into effect from 11pm-6am. Cities like Madrid and Barcelona have even more restrictions making it unlikely we will even be able to get in. Our next destination was supposed to be France, but most of the country is now back in lockdown.
The reality has set in that our trip is nearing its end. But there’s also the unwritten possibility that this could be the end of our travels for many years to come. Covid-19 isn’t going away anytime soon. A vaccine may present itself in the next few months that might mitigate some of the spread of this deadly disease, but there’s still many unanswered questions.
How long will immunity last?
How long will it take to produce enough shots to vaccinate a majority of the population?
How many anti-vaxers will refuse to take the shot?
When half the population is vaccinated, will the masks come off?
Will we have to carry proof of vaccine?
Will we be stopped on the streets and asked for our papers?
When will we be able to move around the world again?
When we will enjoy the freedom to travel to places unknown?
Or will Trump’s nationalism spread globally leaving the U.S. isolated from the rest of the world?
Will Americans always be stuck in America?
If that’s the case, I’d rather be on the outside looking in. Even though Covid cases are exploding in Europe, I feel much safer here than I would back home. It’s not so much the compulsory masks which I find kind of overkill when walking down the street. Here in Spain, there are no social distancing rules inside businesses. People seated at indoor bars and restaurants for an hour are much more likely to spread Covid than a one-second encounter walking past someone on the street. We play it safe by eating most of our meals at outdoor cafes which is easy when the weather is nice. At the Picasso Museum today, everyone wore a mask, but no one bothered to keep two meters apart.
But the reason I feel safer here is because we never interact with someone without a mask. At home, we’d let our guard down. We’d visit with friends or go out to group dinners at restaurants. We’d sneak into house parties and backyard bbqs and our kids would return to their classrooms to hang out with their friends. In Spain, we have no friends. We only have each other. The only way we could get Covid is if Drew brings it home with him from someone he met. This is, of course, a possibility, but much less so than it would be at home where he runs with many different groups of friends.
So the question for us- and I’m sure many others- is risk tolerance. Will we ever travel again? Will we give up our freedom to move about the world for a semblance of safety? Are you really safer staying at home? I, for one, am not ready to give up. I’ll take my chances living my life on my own terms. That does not mean I won’t be safe. I’ve made it three months without becoming infected. I don’t plan on letting my guard down, at least not on this trip.
I know some of you will read this and think I’m selfish. My son thinks I sound like a Trump supporter. I get it. If everyone was traveling like we are, I’m sure the disease would spread even further and faster. But what if this doesn’t end? How long would you go before you’re ready to travel again? How long are you willing to give up your freedom? If I have to choose between life and liberty, I’d rather die living.
