Travelling in a Pandemic

 Everything’s virtual. Oscar is in virtual school, Ferris is closed to in person classes at this

time and my clients are mainly virtual. For travel junkies, this is impossible to resist. If we can all do our jobs and school from anywhere…why should we stay home? I know that we should because we are supposed to be staying away from people. But what if we stay away from people in wide open spaces that aren’t as cold as Michigan? This is a different type of travel for us, we are minimizing stops to minimize exposure and planning on mainly National Parks where we can be outside. We also are taking a ton of stuff with us so that we can minimize our interactions with stores too, plus I have a car this time. It’s too much room for someone who is used to packing minimally for planes and stuff. I go completely

overboard with a fridge pack and snacks and food in the car. We have broken the trip into 8 hour blocks and then stop for at least 5 days in one place so there is time to disinfect, complete school for Oscar, grade and post assignments for John, and see clients for me. We each have 6 masks to rotate before doing laundry and then disposable masks, Clorox wipes, a full bottle of sanitizer that refills all of our little bottles. The clothes are the smallest part of the packing for this trip again. I also have a full pharmacy of vitamins; multi, B, C, D and pepcid, melatonin on top of all of our usual

batteries of prescribed medications. We have more groceries, laptops, and medicine than clothes. We each have a cell phone and a laptop for this trip and that includes all of the cords that go with each on top of earbuds and earphones and we need a bigger car for this trip. We arrive in Litchfield, IL on our first day out. We have a little one bedroom air bnb that is perfect size for us and is surrounded by railroad tracks. I think this is horrible because there is a ton of trains

coming through with horns all night and day, but Oscar is in seventh heaven. Our five days here consist of two where we never leave the house except to run out when we hear a train whistle to watch the trains go by. On Saturday, we got to see or hear 11 trains through the day and Oscar and I stood about 10 feet from one train as it went by. We were supposed to go to Springfield on this day and see the Lincoln museum, but everything has closed down in Illinois, so we use the day to watch trains and catch up on our virtual work.