The Beginning

Today I’m going to share some of my experiences traveling during COVID, by car and by plane. Some of my trips have been recreational or to see family, and some have been for work. This is not meant to make a political statement, but to share one person’s observations and stories while traveling in the midst of a global pandemic. I want to emphasize that I have not been jet setting willy-nilly across the country, but have tried to be discerning with when and why I travel. I have gotten better about this with time.

Like many people, I’ve spent the majority of 2020 in my house, in my town, and in my state. Luckily for me, I worked from home before COVID and was a bit of a hermit to begin with, so most of my adjustments were minimal. One not so minimal adjustment was the end of my monthly week-long business trips. This was not the end of the world. These trips were mostly so my boss and I could work together in-person rather than over the phone or email. I don’t mind the phone or email, but my boss, whom I have immense respect for, is a bit of a dinosaur and very much prefers to look at me and tell me what he needs.

I was in Iowa on one of these business trips when the first COVID cases in the state were reported in March. In fact, I was in the same city as the first cases and watched the number rise in the headlines over the next week (the actual, physical headlines in a real-life newspaper delivered to the house every day). At first, we watched cautiously, but still planned on flying to California to conduct field work a few weeks later (we study the aftermath of wildfires). I booked my airfare for this field work that Wednesday – a roundtrip ticket from Denver to LAX for $166.80. My friend who lives in LA called it the “super-duper global pandemic discount.” The very next day, with things getting worse, my boss canceled the field work. We discussed the situation and decided I would not return to Iowa again until things calmed down. I have everything I need to work from home already, and there was no point in endangering myself or my boss.

When I flew back to Denver, social distancing and safety measures were still very lax. The acronym “PPE” was just starting to enter our vocabulary. I saw more masks than I’d ever seen before, but they were definitely in the minority. I wasn’t wearing one. Boarding was by group number and people bunched up near the line waiting for their group to be called. I’ve always found these people annoying and make a point of sitting in my seat and not fighting to be first in line to continue to wait in line on the jet bridge. Things went smoothly until I got to Denver. If you’ve never been through the Denver International Airport, there’s a train that goes between the three terminals and baggage claim, and there’s usually one every two minutes or so. For whatever reason, on this particular day the trains were moving at a pace of about one every 15 minutes. There was a mass of people milling about waiting, not wearing masks, and not social distancing. When a train did show up, it sat for at least five minutes. The cars were packed. I tried waiting for the crowds to thin, but eventually realized if I didn’t join the crush I would never get on the train. As I inched my way forward, surrounded by people on all sides, I couldn’t help but think it was the perfect time and place for the zombie apocalypse to spontaneously ignite. I was extremely uncomfortable. I finally squeezed myself on the train and made it to baggage claim and ground transportation. When I came up the escalator from the train I saw a man wearing a well-fitting face mask holding a sign that read “Welcome home from Australia Katie. Two weeks of quarantine begin…NOW.” I quickly collected my luggage and got in my shared Lyft. The other passenger and driver wore face masks. I stayed with my in-laws that night, then drove home to Wyoming the next day, happy to be home.

As the dumpster fire of 2020 continued floating down the flooded streets of its metaphorical town, I settled into my newly stationary life. My husband and I were quite content to stay put and ventured out as little as possible. I reduced my trips to the grocery store. He continued going into work, but there are so few of them that everyone was able to isolate in their offices and have a bathroom to themselves. We bought cloth masks and keep them in a plastic tote next to the door with hand sanitizer. However, you can’t control other people.

Yellowstone

When my wanderlust-filled grandfather visited in May I took him to all the isolated desert tourist locations I knew of. I made sure he had a mask ready in his car, even if he didn’t wear it. Then July came, and with it my first significant road trip since COVID started. My family had been intending to visit me in Wyoming en masse before COVID, but most had backed out. Two of my aunts didn’t. Against my better judgement, we went to Yellowstone. In July. During COVID. There are so many things wrong with this decision, and I do not recommend anyone visit Yellowstone in July ever, let alone during a global pandemic, but I’m sort of glad I went. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have taken these pictures:

Those are hundreds of people gathering to see Old Faithful, stretching into the distance. Social distancing was not observed, and there were more people who weren’t wearing masks than were. For July 2020, Yellowstone saw normal numbers of visitors (955,645 visits to be exact), though at the time the number of park visits for the entire year was down 27%. This is even more impressive when you realize that the park isn’t getting the floods of foreign tourists it usually does. This trend has continued since I visited. You can read this article from USA Today reporting on Yellowstone’s record-breaking September visitor numbers. Don’t get me wrong. I know that by being there I was part of the problem. I wore a mask, did my best to maintain social distance, and was relieved to return home.

Driving

My next experience with COVID travel occurred at the end of September. My aunt was getting married in Iowa, and they were holding a family reunion at the same time. When I RSVP’d, I was under the impression that a lot of the family (my dad’s side) was going to be attending. I’d avoided family reunions on purpose all through graduate school because I was depressed and full of anxiety and didn’t want to discuss anything about my life with people I’d only seen a handful of times, whom I expected not to understand my choices, and, though well-intentioned, would probably say something that would either make me burst into tears or want to scrub my brain with sandpaper to forget. I’d avoided them for nearly a decade, and since I was now in a much better place mentally, I figured it was time to rejoin them. Turns out I seriously underestimated that side of the family. I expected them to be part of the “masks are an infringement on my rights” or “masks are actually bad for you” or “COVID is a lie” crowds. While some of them may (and do) still adhere to one or more of these unfortunate opinions, I was only one of two family members to come from out of state. Should I have gone? Maybe not, but I made a lot of conscious decisions along the way to minimize the risk.

The first choice I made was to drive rather than fly. That’s a 15-hour drive. If I was even five years younger I would have started at 5 AM and done it all in one day, but since I’m not, and I like to be well-rested, and I wanted to take my time to safely eat with both hands in a parking space while playing Pokemon GO rather than with one as I sped down the interstate, I broke the trip into two days. This meant I needed to find a place to sleep en route. I wasn’t comfortable with staying at a roadside motel that may or may not have observed good cleaning practices, so I made the mature, safety conscious decision to sleep in the back of my yellow two-door Chevy Cobalt at an I-80 truck stop.

Now, I planned this out. I spent a month combing Amazon for air mattresses designed to fit in the back of a vehicle, but most of them were for vans or large SUVs with backseats anywhere from five to twelve inches longer than mine. I saw one review where a woman said the mattress fit in the back of her Prius, but by that point I was short on time and skeptical based on the solidly mediocre reviews I kept reading. So I gathered up all the spare blankets and pillows in the house and tossed them in the backseat after carefully packing the rest of my stuff to make a semi-level surface.

I researched truck stops based on distance from my starting point, proximity to quickly obtainable food and bathroom facilities, reviews (on Google and on websites intended for long-haul truckers), and how big and well-lit they seemed to be on GoogleMaps’ satellite imagery. I settled on the Bosselman Travel Center in Grand Island, Nebraska. I parked directly under a light in range of two Pokestops and a Gym and three spots away from another vehicle that looked like they were pulling the same stunt as me.

The inside of my car at the Bosselman Truck Stop. My junimo friend bounced around the car.

The second choice I made during this trip was to spend most of it in relative isolation. I was in Iowa for two weeks. The first week I spent in a hotel across the street from work and interacted with only my boss and my friend. I bought groceries and split them between the mini fridge in the hotel and the mini fridge at work. My boss’s wife also baked me cinnamon rolls (they were amazing). Oh, and I wore a mask everywhere. At the gas stations I stopped at along the way. In the lab that only my boss, myself, and one other guy have access to. Outside in the parks with my friend where people were doing pretty good at social distancing. The only time it came off was when I ate or was in my hotel room. On my first Friday, I went to an apple orchard with my friend before driving to my mother’s.

I spent the second week with my mom and sisters. I left the house four times – once to take my little sister hiking on a cold and drizzly Monday, once to buy cinnamon rolls for my mom and aunt, and twice to walk the dog with my sister and catch pokemon. I didn’t leave for my dad’s until noon the day of the wedding, and I left at 7 AM the day after.

My return drive was less planned than the drive out. My initial plan was to stop at whatever truck stop looked friendly enough since Grand Island was too close to be a viable stopover on the return trip. This plan backfired when I realized I was going to be in an area with minimal services close to the Nebraska-Wyoming border when I started getting tired. This was when I broke down. I pulled off at a rest stop, downloaded the Hotels.com app, and made a reservation at a motel off the interstate in Cheyenne. This would mean I could get a decent night’s sleep and only have a six hour drive the next day. My husband and I had stayed at this motel before, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. I checked in, parked in front of my first floor room, checked to make sure the window was locked (I once had a guy try to climb through a first floor hotel window I’d assumed was locked), and brought in just my purse and a fleece blanket (those rags hotels call comforters couldn’t keep a hotdog warm in a warmer). I was tired but decided to check for bedbugs, just to be on the safe side. I didn’t find bedbugs, but I did find these under the mattress:

I left them alone because they weren’t going to stab me through the mattress and went to bed, but did tell management the next morning when I checked out. On the suggestion card in the room I wrote that maybe they should look under the mattresses when they clean the rooms. I got home around noon and immediately implemented my third major choice of the trip: quarantine. At the time Iowa was a hotspot for COVID cases, so I went into quarantine for two weeks.

Flying

In my first week of quarantine my boss called. One of the ways 2020 has left its mark on California has been an absurd outbreak of wildfires. My boss had picked up a project on a fire that was almost fully contained and we needed to get out there to evaluate the soil conditions before the winter rains arrived. The travel dates miraculously coincided with the end of my quarantine, so I bought a plane ticket for the first time in seven months. Concerned, my boss insisted that I fly first class (I’m reimbursed for travel) and requested that I wear the professional grade face shield he’d bought me in addition to a cloth mask. The face shield makes me look like Darth Vader and is comfortable as long as my ponytail isn’t too high, so I was cool with it. I humored him with first class, figuring I’d try it out to see if it was something I liked.

The biggest issue I had with first class was the boarding. United has adjusted boarding policies for COVID. People board from the back of the plane forward, and they aren’t allowed to congregate in the general vicinity of the line until their row has been called. This makes complete sense in a global pandemic where minimizing contact and maintaining social distance is important. What annoyed me is that despite being at the very front of the plane first class got to board first with the very back rows. This means that every person on that plane (and the planes I’ve been on have been full because there are fewer flights) has to file past the 15 or so people in first class. What is the good of boarding from the back of the plane at this point??? I find this practice to be ludicrous and, frankly, irresponsible, but I don’t run the airlines. The only thing I can do is bitch about it in the review they ask me to submit after every flight and refuse to fly first class again during COVID. We’re going back to California soon and I compromised with my boss about my seating. Pre-COVID I preferred to sit in the very back row where the cheapest and smallest seats are (but the bathrooms are there too). For my upcoming flight, I chose seats close to the front that I had to pay extra for. My one small boycott will not make a difference and someone else will fill that overpriced seat, but I will be less a part of the problem, and that makes me feel better even if it doesn’t make much of a difference.

Other than being disgusted with first class, there were a couple things that caught my attention while flying during COVID. The first was while I was sitting at the gate in the airport. I was at the end of a row of five seats, the other four all being empty, when a woman sat down two seats away from me and started eating. Technically, she was following the posted guidelines in the airport asking people to put one seat between themselves and others, but, in my mind, she was violating pre-COVID social distancing. Every other seat in that row was empty. She could have sat at the other end, putting three seats between us rather than one. Why wouldn’t you choose to sit farther away from a stranger if you had the option, especially right now? I told my boss and coworker about this oblivious woman and both agreed with my assessment of the situation, so I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, but who knows?

On a lighter note, when I was on my way home from California I saw something I’d never seen before. I’d just finished with security and was heading to my gate when I saw this vending machine:

I’d gotten up at 2 AM to make it to the airport, so I had to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating a PPE vending machine. I chose to find its existence humorous rather than dark or scary, and hey, the hand sanitizer bottles small enough to pass security will run out, or your kid will squeeze it all out on the floor, or you’ll forget yours. Then this machine is no longer an amusing novelty item – it’s a necessity.

Moving Forward

I am still not doing monthly business trips to work in-person with my boss, but just like my work load COVID isn’t going away any time soon. Field work is a necessity in my line of work, so I will continue to travel when needed, taking as many precautions as possible. It’s winter now, so it’s unlikely we’ll get any familial visits until late spring (I-80 is dangerous in Wyoming in the winter). If I am called back to Iowa for whatever reason, I’ll probably fly. My boss looked into it and learned that with the way planes circulate air it is very hard for most viruses to spread onboard, though not impossible. Since I’m traveling a fair bit right now I will be spending a lot of time in quarantine. All of October was spent either traveling or in quarantine. When this is published I’ll have one day left in my most recent round. I’m looking forward to three weeks of non-quarantine living where I can buy my own groceries on occasion and take the car in for an oil change. My next round of traveling and quarantine will eat up most of December, but that’s okay. I like my job. I might actually be able to help people if I keep doing it. I also like not putting people in my community in unnecessary danger. That’s why I’ll keep practicing quarantining after every trip. I think it’s worth it.