For anyone who travels whether for want or have to, this has been a perilous time of trying to find our way in the world. There have been shut downs and barriers and screenings and closings and precautions and on the list goes. As we all struggle to understand any of this, we are simply no longer bound by our decisions, but by the decisions that others are making for us.
We know people who are still travelling, still planning on travelling or who have traveled. The ones, who if able, will travel come what may. They follow all the needed guidelines to do so, just as long as they can. Those are the ones who travel out of want, the ones filled with wanderlust and adventure. They are the hopeful kind that will continue to dream of views from foreign mountains and trains that crawl through Europe. It is a dream that they refuse to let go of.
As with everything there is a risk. There is not a place without it, no matter what the event or movement there is always an element of the unknown. Before the days of the current pandemic, travel during the flu season or to a country with known health warnings posed a similar exposure. This time it seems that we can catch it and spread it quicker than anything else, yet I remember stories of people, including myself, sick with colds from a long plane ride. It happens. The question then becomes different, especially now. Is it worth the risk?
The airlines are taking an abundance of caution with cleaning and going the distance with sanitation and provisions of safety. You are required to wear a mask and sit apart from fellow travelers. Is right now the safest most sanitary time to fly? There have been countless studies before Covid of the cleanliness of tray tables and seat backs and you still flew, still ate the food and breathed the air. Now, with the carriers being more careful than careful, what stops us?
While countries are closing their borders and limiting travel in and out, we too are limited. Yet somewhere in there it feels hopeful to dream of Paris and London, to believe that in a post pandemic world, life and travel will get a bit back to a place we know. If it never really returns to us the way that it was, how do we adapt? We still do what we have always done, just this time we do it a bit differently than before.
So travelers and dreamers… do not stop. Book that trip, plan that dream, put flesh into ideal and just perhaps it will be realized in a far grander way than you could have at first imagined.