Getting Away By Staying Home?! Welcome to Summer 2020.

Staycation: (noun) 1. a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities within driving distance of their home and does not require overnight accommodation. Synonyms include holistay and daycation           --Wikipedia, alt.

Summer vacation 2019: round trip 1,391 mile flight to Minneapolis, Minnesota; three week stay in a downtown Airbnb, followed by a 12-day, five-game, 14-state 2,117-mile baseball road trip, from Boston to Aberdeen, Maryland, to Hickory, North Carolina, to Dayton, Ohio, to Akron, Ohio, to Binghamton, New York and then back home.

Summer staycation 2020: trip to Dairy Queen in Natick; jaunt to the CVS in Medfield for sunscreen; 5 mile bike ride to pond in Millis; hot dogs and onions rings with Mom on her front porch in Quincy; quick day trips to New Hampshire, Vermont and the Cape, always back home by sunset; way too many leisure afternoons on the back porch, watching my garden grow.

Oh, what a difference a year makes.

The year of the vacation has given way to the year of the staycation. Of watching as the suitcases and backpacks in the front hall closet collect dust, and sit forlornly, unused, never packed full and then stowed in the trunk for some distant trip. The year I actually got money back from my insurance company, because I’ve driven so few miles in the past four and a half months. The year that the Mass Pike is not a parking lot but is instead a barely peopled highway, with rest stops like ghost towns and bumper to bumper traffic a thing of the past.      

Who’d have ever thought this would be the summer of so many cancelled travel plans? Of hoped for exotic trips put on hold, put off, postponed, delayed until…who knows when?  I was actually planning and hoping to take an epic road trip this season, something which always highlights my summer time away.  Nothing I love more to do than to get in the car and fill it up with gas and stock up on Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke and Cheese Combos and program the GPS and download some Audible books and then just hit the road.

This year’s journey was to be my three day drive to the Twin Cities, by way of Ithaca and Cleveland and Chicago, and then two weeks at a writing retreat in the wilds of northern Minnesota, interspersed with little league baseball games and movies in a chilled theater on a hot August afternoon and barbeques with the friends that I only get to see but once a year.

Not this year.

I’m trying my best to maintain a stiff upper lip when it comes to the very real disappointment of missing my trips and long planned vacations. Trying to see some kind of silver lining to being grounded for the duration.  Save money? Yup.  Avoid wear and tear on the car? Check. Support local businesses? Certainly. Spend more time with close by family and friends? Absolutely. Be in a travel funk along with almost everyone else I know? Definitely.

It’s sobering to realize just how much travel has just ground to a halt in these days of COVID-19. Worldwide revenue from travel and tourism has plummeted by almost 35 percent in 2020, compared to last year. TSA passenger screenings at U.S. airports are down 75 percent from July 2019.  Logan Airport is the quietest it’s even been in my lifetime. And if you do choose to travel, the challenges are very real: packed planes and so many places in the United States where folks are less than committed in their mask wearing and social distancing and, of course, there’s the requirement to quarantine for two weeks back here in Massachusetts, if you do choose to go away to most places on the U.S. map.

So, in anticipation of the time when we will travel once again, when we will become again a people of the road and the summer road trip, and summer vacations, these things I do solemnly promise: I promise to not complain about the length of the security line I have to wait in before I board my plane. I promise to embrace with relish the time when my airplane seatmate hogs the armrest or falls asleep on my shoulder.  I promise to let out a yell of joy the next time I am sitting in highway traffic anywhere in the United States, turn up the music even louder and just sing at the top of my lungs. “ON THE ROAD AGAIN!” I promise to say a prayer of thanks to God the next time I see a sign at a state border, any border, that joyfully proclaims, “You Are Now Entering….” 

I promise to never, ever again take for granted the miracle that is travel and the gift it truly is to see and experience all the different parts of God’s beautiful and diverse and amazing creation: near and far. 

But for now: anybody up for a road trip to the local DQ? I’m buying. Chili dogs and blizzards for everyone!

Happy staycation 2020.