For the last few years, I’ve kept a list on my phone of all the states and countries I went to during that year, as a nice reminder of all the new places I’ve gone. I was looking at my 2020 list, and while it is far from what I’d imagined at the beginning of the year, I realized that I still learned a lot about both the places around me and travel in general. Here are the travel learnings I’m taking into the new year and moving forward:
Take time to revisit places.
Historically, my travel plans have been very focused on new places that I’ve never been before. In 2020, the only new place I ended up visiting was Tennessee, when we hopped over from Blue Ridge, Georgia, for lunch and a hike. Otherwise, every state and country I went to in 2020 was a place I had been before, even with some city repeats from earlier in the year, like Charleston, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. Guess what? It was lovely. It reduced the stress to see and do everything because I’d been there before, and meant that I didn’t feel guilty if I wanted to stay in or take it easy.
Asheville in January 2020 
Asheville in November 2020
Prioritize visiting your friends.
Because you never know when you won’t be able to see them again. I had layovers on my way to and from Columbia, South Carolina when I booked the cheapest tickets available over MLK weekend, but it meant I got to see my friend Chelsea (as well as share Charleston and Asheville with her). I flew into Scottsdale, Arizona, the weekend before our work conference to spend time with my friend Emily, and then flew from there to Colorado, so I could spend several days snow tubing in the mountains and running around ice castles with my friend Liz. I expected that I would see all of my closest friends at some point in the year, but with COVID, that just didn’t happen. I’m so glad I was able to share these moments with them when I did.
Road trip once in a while.
I still prefer to travel by plane or by train, but with the current circumstances, it has felt safest for us to embrace travel by car. When we road tripped to Savannah, Georgia, for our anniversary in July, we found that it actually had a lot of advantages compared to our preferred means of travel, especially with me being pregnant. We didn’t have to pack particularly lightly, we could stop whenever we wanted (or needed to pee), we could bring ~900 snacks to munch on throughout the trip, and we were able to bring our dogs along for the ride. That experience made it easy for us to agree on an even further road trip for our “babymoon” in November, when we hit up Asheville and Blue Ridge; I can definitely see us taking more trips like this in the future.
Spontaneous stop at Tallulah Gorge State Park 
Spontaneous stop at Tallulah Gorge State Park
Pursue travel refunds and credits.
I started 2020 chasing a refund for our non-existent train to Glasgow from December 2019, but the cancelled trips began stacking up. I am persistent when it comes to getting my money back (especially when I’m not the one who cancelled the trips), so I learned a few tricks along the way. I spent a few hours over the past week chatting with customer service at an OTA because I saw the airline policy had changed, and I was actually able to extend our flight credit with them; it was originally supposed to be rebooked by the end of 2020 for early 2021, but now we’re able to use it by early 2022. This is much better for us, considering at 34 weeks pregnant, I’m not flying anywhere soon. Don’t take the loss easily!
Keep planning travel.
One of my first posts on the blog talked about why I’m still planning travel, and now, these reasons still ring true. Yes, we ended up cancelling our three-week trip to South America for December, but I have so many great ideas already planned for when we finally get to go. Two weeks ago, we ended up spontaneously booking flights to Tahiti for September 2021 because the price was so good. I dug into itineraries for French Polynesia and learned about the wonders of the island of Mo’orea before we ultimately ended up cancelling the flights within our 24-hour window; at this point, we just don’t know whether we’ll want to travel across the world with (or without) our then 7-month old. However, I won’t stop dreaming about my next trip, whatever that might be.
Charleston in January 2020 
Ice Castles in February 2020 
Scottsdale in February 2020