Our Summer of Covid-19 — But Where Will You Live?

Our summer travel plans continue to evolve as the Covid-19 situation unravels. Although at the time of writing many places have begun to reopen, virtually every country in the world will not allow Americans to enter their borders for the foreseeable future. Although many are claiming that they'll be more welcoming over the next few months, it simply doesn’t make sense to make firm plans for international travel, even to the few foreign locales that are open for tourism. After all, borders can close on very short notice (and there IS still a pandemic happening). Although many airlines are offering unprecedented flexibility, that generally is limited to fee-free changes or cancellation for a credit (not refund). We’re not eager to be give up our flexibility to choose the best available times and fares across airlines. So we’ve completely scrapped all international travel until early December.

Although we’d cancelled our trip to Tokyo in July over a month ago, we’ve since also dropped our plans for Mongolia and Australia. We’re very disappointed, as I was particularly excited to visit Mongolia and Carrie has never been to Australia. But all we can do now is roll with the punches and make the best plans we can here in the ol’ US of A.

After leaving Rocky Mountain National Park in mid-June, we stopped in Tampa to visit family and our little storage unit for a week before heading to Beaufort, NC and the southern Outer Banks, where we enjoyed seeing the wild horses on the Shackleford Banks and sitting on the beach at Cape Lookout National Seashore. We spent the week of the 4th here on sunny Seagrove Beach, near Seaside and Destin in the panhandle of Florida. Some of the best beaches in the world are here, including Grayton, which was recently ranked the number one beach in the US.

In a couple of days we’ll head to Bryson City, NC, in the Great Smoky Mountains. We’ll be there for more than two weeks of hiking and fresh mountain air. We’ve never been to this national park, which is also the most visited park in the country. Fortunately, we’re on the less crowded side and not far from Asheville, temporary home of our good friends Tim and Amy, who are also home free nomads and chronicle their journey on a blog and vlog called GoWithLess. We already have plans to meet up with them for a (socially distanced) visit to the Biltmore!

After the Smokies, we’ll make a couple of short stops to see some family before landing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We've got seven weeks planned there through all of August and most of September. Although we’ve been to the White Mountains before (Carrie grew up in Massachusetts, where Jim attended WPI), it’s been many, many years and we're excited to enjoy the hiking and cooler summer weather. With luck we’ll also get to see the leaves change in early fall!

After that, we're crossing the country again and will spend five weeks in Sedona, Arizona. Neither of us have been there and we're both eager to spend some time there. We’ve loved our past visits to Utah and the southwestern landscapes, so we’ll once again plan on putting our hiking shoes to good use. We may even make a trip up to the Grand Canyon.

Finally, we'll wrap up our tour of the US with a short, one week stop in Palm Springs, California, where we hope my brother and his family will join us for at least some of the time, as they live only about eighty minutes away.

We'll continue to be in the US through November and the first week of December, though this is part of our original itinerary visiting friends and family before once again heading out for an extended tour of South America… barring no more Covid-19 interruptions!