Family Vacationing in a Pandemic
I feel like this is somewhat of a confession, and I’ll follow it up with a justification. We’ve taken a couple family vacations during the pandemic. I’ve also taken the kids on a road trip to see family. Now here’s the justification… We had a trip scheduled to Italy for last summer, followed by a trip to Croatia. My son was to sing with his high school choir in the Sistine Chapel, and then we would all meet him there and travel on through Italy over to Croatia. Major disappointment when that didn’t happen. I was and still am determined to make up for lost time.
Our kids were online most of the school year, only returning to part time in person recently. So it was easier to take them and go, as they could log in and learn from anywhere with good wi-fi. This was one benefit of this unprecedented year, and one I intended to take full advantage of. What was not easy was traveling in a pandemic. Logistics were challenging and so here are some of the ways we mitigated our exposure and still had a good time.
One of the first trips we took (other than camping) was up to see the cousins and my sister and mom in Oregon. This was in October and I wanted to show the kids that they could still have fun with this school year, even though they couldn’t be with their friends each day and physically go to school. Yes, it was a risk but we calculated it and felt like it was important. So we went and had a great time. We drove from Southern California to Portland, Oregon all in one day. My mom was not happy with me driving that much all on my own by myself, but it honestly didn’t bother me. We had a great time and managed to do some fabric pumpkin crafts while we were there.
The next road trip we took was to Sun Valley. Again, we were game for road trips only. So we took one dog and loaded up the car for our first ever family ski/snowboarding vacation. We drove a full 12 hours to Twin Falls, Idaho and dropped Moose, the dog, at the boarder. Then another 1.5 hrs to Hailey, Idaho where we stayed in an Airbnb. It was fabulous. We had the best time skiing during the days and then going back and dropping off the kids, and going back out to get takeout. Not only were we able to go on a vacation doing something we had never done before, we did is way cheaper than we had planned. We had to rent gear and get lessons for everyone in the family. It could have been so much money. But we were able to do it for under $3,000 which was very nice. We didn’t ski the big resort in Sun Valley and we rented our gear at the local shop, saving lots of money. Lessons at the smaller ski resorts were hundred of dollars cheaper per person. None of us needed more challenges either, given the level of our skiing and snowboarding abilities. LOL
This vacation was a blast. We also saved money by going to the grocery store and buying food for breakfast and for packing lunches. We skied down to the car and ate our lunches there each day. It was a treat and super fun family bonding. We had a couple mishaps, like Tosca breaking her wrist, but we’re still looking forward to another ski vacation next winter.
The next and most recent trip we took was to Arizona. We thought, let’s choose someplace we can drive to and take the dogs. This vacation was a mistake and we now have many laughs about it. But it wasn’t exactly fun. LOL In taking the dogs, this meant that we weren’t as free to do as many things. We tried the first day to pretend our dogs are like any other sane dogs and went to the Montezuma’s Castle National Monument. As soon as we got out of the car, the little dog Rex started yapping. Then our big dog Moose got in on it and barked his terrifyingly loud woof, woof, woof! We had people turning to us and shaming us. It was ridiculous and laughable and horrifying all at once. Insane. We were attracting so much attention. So having the dogs limited us from any other stops we could make and we drove back the 2+ hours to Prescott. The Airbnb we rented was once again very nice which saved the trip. But we don’t have any plans to go back to the area. It was more spread out than we realized and we also discovered that we should first choose a place we want to go next time, and then choose the city and place to stay around that. Lessons learned.
So there’s our traveling during a pandemic story. We have yet to fly anywhere, although I do have a domestic trip planned for this fall when my niece is getting married. I really want to go to Mexico but cannot convince Calvin to take the plunge, especially now that the State Department is advising against travel there. Ugh. I really miss travel so much. Going through the airport with our little family and buying all the snacks and entertainment items for for the trip. I really miss it and will make plans to travel internationally as soon as it is safe to do so.
