The Bewildering World of Covid-19 Travel

The destination, not the journey.

I had an old friend whose favorite thing to do every time she traveled was unusual: She loved to go to supermarkets. “I love to see how things are different,” she said.

I understood what she meant. Andy Rooney once wrote that, “vacations aren’t necessarily better or worse than ordinary life. They’re just different. Different can be enough.” We travel to get away from our own lives and to see new things, but in many ways, we take trips just to do something a little different than what we usually do. For my friend, a large part of the fun of travel was seeing how supermarkets — a place she spent a lot of time in — were different in other cities or other countries than they were from where she lived. How people grocery shopped told her a little bit about the people went about their daily lives. It told her more about them than they realized.

One of the most disorienting aspects of travel during the pandemic, I’ve found, is adjusting to how differently different pockets of the country have treated Covid-19, and continue to. (I can only speak for the United States: I have not left the country since January 2020.) When the pandemic truly took hold in March 2020, I didn’t leave Athens, Georgia, where I live, until July. We had our own eccentricities. Athens is a college town…