On the Road Again

So. It’s been a while. Like a lot of the world, we haven’t had a whole lot of travel-related stuff to update anyone on. I mean, we’ve left our town a few times since 2020. We took a road trip out west as a family over our winter break. (That trip deserves its own blog post.) M and S2 took their first-ever dad-and-daughter trip to St. Louis. Thanksgiving was spent in Houston with a fun combo of some family members from each side. That’s about it, though. We went from planning a full-on globe trot to barely leaving our neighborhood for over two years. There was the obvious downside to that (understatement of the decade), but there were also some silver linings that came out of it. Again, that deserves its own blog post. Or, like, five posts? 

But for now, I’m daring to talk travel again. I say “daring” because, for all of my lack of religion and superstition, I totally believe in jinxing. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either. Humans are dumb. But just to be safe, I’m putting this disclaimer in writing before I start another paragraph: WE NO LONGER ASSUME ANYTHING WE PLAN WILL ACTUALLY GO AS PLANNED. Thank you, 2020 (and 2021), for lowering our standards drastically. We are properly humbled.

With that out of the way…we’re planning some travel again! It’s exciting! And terrifying! And we’re trying to do some things the same as before but mostly we’re starting from scratch. 

Our first trip will be in a few days. I wanted to dip our toes into international travel before diving all the way in. Forever, the top (maybe only?) item on my bucket list has been to see the Northern Lights. Since our travel plans before had us mostly avoiding winter everywhere we went, I knew the Northern Lights would really need to be chased on a separate trip anyway. Also, the idea of trying to do a country-to-country trip as our first international travel back sounded way too intimidating. So, factoring in all of that plus finding some cheap flights and a Home Exchange, we are headed to Reykjavik, Iceland for Spring Break! Iceland and nowhere else. We’ll fly there for about a week, hope for some cloudless-but-lightful skies, and then retreat back home to regroup for a couple months before trekking out again. (Note: Along the lines of lowered expectations, I’ve also made sure to plan non-Northern Lights activities so even if we don’t see them at all, the trip won’t be a bust.)

We’re all as vaccinated and boosted as we can be currently. Our passports haven’t expired. We still have global entry. And, for now anyway, we only need to show proof of vaccination to get into Iceland. If we somehow manage to test positive on the way back to the U.S., well, at least we’ll have made the trip happen. I guess worst case scenario, we get stuck in Iceland for a while and have to live off of fermented shark and universal healthcare.

Assuming we make it through that trip, we’re also gearing up for a bigger one starting this summer. I wish I could say we’re going to try for a whole year again, but it’s just not in the cards. We’d known all along that once S1 was in high school, it’d be really hard to convince him to leave his friends for a full year. And while we have the hindsight of adults and know that a year traveling the world would make for a really fucking amazing experience, we also have the memories of being teenagers and know that a year feels eternal when you’re 15. So, we let S1 have a lot of input, and he’s cool with leaving in July and missing a semester of his school, and he even threw in another summer before he graduates, to sweeten the deal for his mama. Poor S2 isn’t quite old or wise enough to have much input yet, so we’re just sorta dragging her along. (She will almost definitely enjoy this experience the most of all of us, so I don’t have too much guilt about it.)

We’d been discussing re-starting the travel, off and on, here and there, basically since March of 2020. For most of the last two years, it only created more stress and sadness to even think about it. Every time we’d think, “Okay, maybe we could go to __________,” inevitably _________ would have a spike in COVID cases and everything would lock down. Or we’d find out that the U.S. was banning flights back from there. Or we’d discover that the vaccination rates were so low that we might as well be visiting Mississippi. Or on the other hand, we’d realize that a place was so strict on COVID protocols that we really wouldn’t be able to see anything once we got there anyway. I had no desire to leave my four walls to stay masked up  in a plane for 10 hours, just so I could end up staring at four walls in some apartment in Italy or wherever.

More recently, however, we’ve started feeling a little more confident about making something work. We know that our parenting clock is ticking. The first bird will fly the nest in a few short years. And the pandemic life is normalizing somewhat around the world. We still know it will vary from place to place, and that the rules may continue to be ever-changing for some time, so we will keep that pandemic flexibility we’ve all developed in recent times. 

I actually started this post on February 17th, but life got hectic for a bit, so here I am finishing it on St. Patrick’s Day. During that time, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the world has been thrown for yet another shitty loop. I’m gonna go ahead and post this before some third plague or world war or alien invasion hits, but I’ll end with answering the question we’ve been getting the past couple of weeks: “Are you worried about the war making it dangerous to travel?” The answer is yes. Of course! But honestly, I worry about the war making everywhere dangerous. My hope is that somehow, someone or some sanction (or some bullet?) will get through to Putin, and the poor people of Ukraine can stop dying because one asshole has a small dick or didn’t get hugged enough as a child. If we/they do manage to stop the war, then great, we’ll be on the road. And if they don’t…well, I sure as hell would like to see more of this planet before it’s destroyed. Obviously we wouldn’t ever knowingly put our kids or ourselves into danger, but we’ve all spent a couple years just surviving. I’m ready to live again while I can. So we’ll be cautious and thoughtful about it, but we’re determined to trot this globe. I’ll try to start posting updates again as we plan, and I hope you’ll all share any travel plans with us, too!