The easy answer: my mental health.
As I touched on in our first post, travel is more than just taking time off from work – it involves hoping and planning for the future. Right now, those things can feel impossible, but if you’re like me, you need to do them anyway.
That’s where planning to travel comes in.
I was several weeks into working from home, leaving only for groceries and dog walks, when I realized how down I was feeling about everything. It seemed like I had nothing to look forward to anymore, just more days of being “trapped” in my house. So when I found cheap flights to Peru in December via the Google Flights’ Explore tool, I knew I wanted to snatch them up.
After chatting with my husband, he was aligned, and shortly after, two tickets to Lima had been purchased. It was as if a switch had flipped in my brain. I had a trip to look forward to, to dream about and to plan. I had hashtags to follow, locations to research and itineraries to create. While I might be at home for the near future, I could hold out for the day when I boarded a plane for a new adventure.
Doing this really made a positive impact on my mental health, but we were still smart about it. We didn’t actually book the cheapest tickets available from Tampa to Lima because we wanted 1) an airline we felt relatively confident wouldn’t go bankrupt by the end of the year, and 2) an airline that was offering flexible cancellations and rebookings for new flights booked.
At this point, we also haven’t booked anything besides the tickets, though Tyler and I have built out a spreadsheet of several itinerary options; we want to be closer and more confident in our flight before booking anything else, especially if any of those hotels or other activities are nonrefundable.
It’s quite possible that the coronavirus (or something else we can’t imagine right now) may keep us from going on this trip, but in the meantime, it means so much to me to have some travel to look forward to. The world might keep this b!tch from tripping this year, but she’ll keep planning vacations.
