…I know that I really shouldn’t.
The last week or so, I’ve found myself escaping through watching various travel vlogs – Kara and Nate have been one of my favorites – and after watching their most recent videos about coming back to the States (after traveling abroad for four years!) and buying a van to tour the USA while this COVID-thing works out, there’s admittedly a part of me that would like to hit the road myself and take the family exploring…
…and at first glance, it doesn’t sound all that crazy. Traveling by road in our van, we could limit exposure and get take out just like we do here at home.
But then there’s hotel rooms … because there’s only so much cleaning a maid can really do!
And besides that, there’s what do you do when you get to wherever you’re going?!
Plus, I would argue that it’s a lot easier for a young couple to go off the cuff and just play things by ear in random road trip fashion, whereas kids will only stay buckled in their car seats for so long before they start making demands that their iPads and the TV in the van simply can’t handle!
At one point, I even looked into vacation homes just here in Florida because Sara had a friend who stayed at an awesome one over in Orlando with slides and ball pits and all sorts of cool themed rooms for the kids … yet she also mentioned spending five hours cleaning every surface imaginable on her own after the owner also had a professional cleaning crew do the place over themselves.
The fact of the matter is, even as I’m getting a little stir-crazy here, I know deep down that right now is a terrible time to travel, as depicted abruptly here in Exhibit A:
For those of you playing along at home…
- In the last five days since my last post, Florida added 47,677 new cases, which is about 9,000 cases more than the previous 5-day period.
- Yesterday Florida took the record for the most new cases reported by a state in one day at 11,458, beating out a previous day set by New York back in April (according to Johns Hopkins’ data, anyways).
- Despite having one of the worst spikes, Florida is one of several states that still does not have a statewide mask restriction. (thankfully the counties around the Tampa Bay area have all passed their own local ordinances)
If anything, it’s kind of scary to realize that looking back to when I first started blogging about COVID-19, our national chart looked like this…
…and now we’re using that same scale, but at the state level for Florida instead of the national level!
For comparison’s sake when I look at this later, here’s that national chart three and a half months later…
Anyways, to wrap this up so I can get to bed, instead of traveling I’ve really been trying to focus on sprucing things up around the house to make our home a little more enjoyable while we wait out COVID as long as it takes. We recently got our pool cage rescreened after far too many years of having panels blown out by the wind, and the bamboo that always haunted me in our backyard has now nearly been removed, too.
As a result, I think I was in the pool with the kids every single day over the holiday weekend, which was nice, and it gave me some exercise, and most of all, it does wonders for wearing them out at the end of the day!
Next on the list is getting someone out to service the heater for our hot tub that has also been broken for over a year, and I’ve also been playing with some fun outdoor lighting options to add the pool area to bring my growing Hue obsession poolside!
Between all of that and the new patio furniture that we just splurged on, I’m pretty excited about it … or at least I’m trying to remind myself that I am whenever I daydream about driving the family cross country in search of something new and exciting that doesn’t also carry the inevitable threat of COVID. 🙁