Fall Travel Plans? [NOT 23/8/21]

23/8/21 brightersideoflife 27
tourist heavily laden down with things strapped to backpack

Hi, friends!

Wondering your thoughts on fall travel this year?

I will probably be travelling for work in October and I’m really tempted to take an extra few days to spend on the Virginia coast.

I like travelling alone, and what I want to do is wander on the beach, go hiking in some state parks, see the Chincoteague wild ponies, and eat seafood.

From a covid risk perspective, most of this can be done outside, and I’m more than happy to get food to-go and eat in the hotel room. I’ll have a rental car while I’m there, so I won’t be breathing all over Uber drivers, etc.

Good idea? Bad idea? Thoughts? Anyone else travelling this fall? I’m vaccinated and depending on when the work trip happens, I might even have my booster shot before then. And I have no problem masking, so I don’t feel like there’s a significant covid risk involved.

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27 Comments

  1. I’m going to the shore to visit my sister the first week of September. We’ll mostly cook or eat takeout, and lay around the pool. I won’t have to be around strangers or crowds. My daughter and I were planning on going to The Mothman Festival at the end of September but with the Delta variation I think we’ll skip it. I had a couple of other small trips planned to visit friends later in the fall but I’m not sure that’s going to happen either. 
    I love Chincoteague , and you will mostly be outside.  I say go for it! And say hello to Misty for me. 

  2. I am reading a book about Spain. It’s kind of a history/food/travel guide (it’s a freelance gig and it’s not published yet so I can’t really tell you what it is, and in any event it doesn’t have a formal title yet) and it makes me want to teleport myself back to one of my favorite countries and spend the rest of my life there. There’s a German term for this, Sehnsucht. There is a German term for everything. It means, according to an online dictionary, “yearning; wistful longing.” I just know it as “Sehnsucht.” 

    Problem is, I have Better Half (who also fell in love with Spain with me) and the Faithful Hound (who I’m sure would come to love Spain) and a cargo ship’s worth of crap, so transporting this all across the mighty Atlantic would prove daunting.

    I have a few American friends who moved to Australia, most to live with their partners. One took a freighter with all his crap and two dogs. It was a reasonably priced voyage, considering, but it took eight weeks, because the freighter’s real job was to deliver mainland American goods, first to Hawaii, then to various islands in Polynesia, then to the eastern coasts of various Asian countries, and then finally to Australia. The freighter crew were all Filipino so he, being a good linguist, learned a fair amount of Tagalog, their language. They all came from some specific area of the Philipines but I can’t remember where he told me this was. He is a very good cook so he also assumed kitchen duty, for which they were grateful. You can see why he was one of my closest friends, before he high-tailed it off to the Land Down Under.

      • He enjoyed it. He brought a ton of books along with all his other stuff, he’s a bibliophile like me, and he kept a journal, and he’d walk the dogs, and cook, and chat with the crew. His “stateroom” was an unused cell-like space below the waterline that normally would have been occupied by two crew members but they didn’t have/need a full complement for this voyage so the shipping company, never one to let free space go to waste, made it available to landlubbers. He and the dogs were quite cozy in there, apparently. How he found out about this I don’t know.

        Oh, and I forgot to mention this. He lived in New York, so he packed up all his stuff and shipped it forward to the Port of Los Angeles, which is in San Pedro. There, it was off-loaded and stored in a warehouse awaiting the sailing date of the HMS Endeavour, or whatever the Australia-bound freighter was called. He and the hounds went on a cross-country road trip that lasted six weeks. Of course he brought his car with him.

        How did he pull this off financially? He bought a townhouse in a then- undesirable neighborhood and, a mere decade later, sold it for 16 times what he paid for it when the neighborhood became “hot.” Plus we worked together and he was senior to me so I assume his salary was more benificent than mine, at the time. 

  3. I’m going to Minneapolis for the ATA conference the last few days of October, staying at a separate hotel that just reopened after a year of renovation aspires to be swanky. I’m taking the super expensive, super difficult-to-pass certification exam while I’m up there, too.

  4. I’m going to Hilo in 2 weeks then Oahu & both siblings just sent me story that Gov. Ige is telling tourists not to come.  He is a moron that has caused the current crisis in Hawaii & I don’t consider myself a tourist & seeing my 95 year old mom is essential travel.  I am also going to eastern WA.  3x in the next month or so which is the Trumpier side of the state so that could be a shitshow.  

  5. After having the trip cancelled last year, this Fall Mrs. Butcher and I will be taking a road trip to OH to visit to friends of mine whom I haven’t seen in 25 years and we just got reconnected a couple of years ago.  It will involve some back road driving and little shop shopping for Mrs. Butcher, visiting a couple of places that I really want to see, hanging out with my friends and generally relaxing and having a good time.

    I say go ahead with your VA trip.  You’ve clearly got your shit together, even if the people elsewhere don’t.

  6. Nah. Staying home with the bebes for the rest of my life the interminable pandemic. Getting major Sehnsucht for Paris while watching The Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties. Are the sons hot? I can’t tell if I’m just charmed by all the $$$ and the dynamics of this French family

  8. I could really benefit from using some vacation days…
     
    I’m still hesitant to use much vacation or sick time, as I’ve been working at my current place a bit under two years, and with doing a full bicycle commute, I know one of these days I’m going to get into a collision with an automobile, and likely get a broken limb and need a month or two of accumulated leave to recover from that.
     
    Anyways…  I got this probably bad idea in my head some time ago, and it keeps popping up… 
    Now that I’m sorta kinda financially almost stable-ish, I was thinking of getting a rather nice hand-made or even custom pocket knife.  There’s a decent sized knife show in LA in October, and I think I could take Amtrak down, enjoy the scenery on the ride, do some other stuff in LA, go look at the various offerings at the knife show, and if there isn’t something I like, maybe comission something to my preferences.  Then go maybe do some more LA stuff, and take the train back to the SF Bay Area.
    Except, there is a lot of overlap of the “knife community” and the “firearms community” and a lot of political stuff I disagree with.  I’d really like to get a nice knife, but I’m not sure how much time I can spend in an area full of redhats in order to pursue that goal.
     
    Also keep thinking about going on a backpacking trip, but with the constant fire danger out here, it seems like too many places are either on fire, or about to be on fire, to the point where if you can even go hiking/backpacking, you can’t even use a stove. let alone a fire, and that’s a bit too much discomfort for me without good reason…

  9. i got a couple weeks off coming up…but no travel plans
    all vaxxed up and nowhere to go…..*sigh*
    might go beach bum about on one of our little islands for a couple days…been a while since ive done that.

  10. I haven’t been on a proper vacation in… 20 years? Something like that. Our vacations generally consist of going to stay at my friend’s house and sleeping in her living room for a few days. Oooh, I lied… kids and I went on a proper vacation about 14 years ago. My 2 besties and I took the whole gang of kids (9 kids under age 10!!) and stayed at a cabin in the U.P. for a week. Which was pretty cool, and I wish we had been able to do it again. 
     
    Anyway. I’m rambling. And to answer your actual question, nope, not going anywhere for awhile yet. Next summer, we might go up to Michigan for a few days, if things have settled down by then.

  11. I mostly use my PTO days to staycation. Like yesterday I was off, I went to Lowe’s and bought a dishwasher. Exciting. I’d like to visit my bff in Virginia but i do not relish flying in this environment. Maybe in the spring?

    • Honestly aside from anxiety that some asshole will be a giant bratty baby on a flight, the flying part isn’t bad at all. 

      Do I like wearing a mask while flying? No. Do I also like reducing my risk of getting head colds as well as covid while flying? Definitely. 

      • I used to actually enjoy flying. But every year it gets more expensive, more restrictive, and i seem more likely to get punched or have my luggage set ablaze. The last time i flew (which was for a funeral no less) we got stuck on the tarmac before takeoff for two hours and one of the flight attendants wouldn’t let anyone use the bathroom, their phones, or give us food. 

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