Travel

Been thinking a lot about travel recently.  How long will it be until I start commuting to work again?  With the way things are going in the US, might not be this year.  I’m hardly putting any miles on my car – I keep on getting emails telling me a car service is overdue, but I’ve not been getting any service due warnings on my dashboard yet.  How comfortable am I going on road trips and staying at hotels and living off takeouts?  Not very.  Maybe Airbnb is a better option, but even then how clean are those places kept?  And when will I be able to travel by plane comfortably again?  Could be a considerable amount of time, and then what is the experience going to be like?  I don’t want someone sitting close to me, I’m accepting but not keen with having to wear a mask for the entire duration of say a long flight back to the UK, and what other hoops will we have to jump through?  And how expensive is flying going to be when it eventually comes back?  It’s all a mystery.  If anything, this period of isolation and introspection has made me keen to see more of the world when we do get back to some semblance of normality.  I lost the travel bug a long time ago, but I think I would like to try to get it back – at least a little bit.  I’m always going to be limited by the number of vacation days we get in the US – but I’ve been accumulating these for a while now, and I get an extra week’s vacation when I hit my 5 year anniversary in a few months’ time, so travel starts to become more feasible.  There are a lot of places I would like to go to, and I don’t want to leave everything until too late in my life – though my lack of physical conditioning does limit how adventurous I can be.  Are there destinations I would be willing to go by myself?  Can I find a travel companion to go to other places?  Would I even consider organized tours (unless no choice, I am very reluctant) or a cruise (never – apart from maybe to Antarctica)?  This feels like a classic case of my having to reluctantly step out of my comfort zone to do something that is ultimately more rewarding.  But not any time soon…