How the pandemic has changed our perspectives on travel: Travel Weekly

Lavinia Spalding

Award-winning travel writer Lavinia Spalding has edited six editions of “The Best Women’s Travel Writing,” co-hosts the podcast “There She Goes,” contributes to several media outlets and teaches writing workshops around the world.

When the pandemic began in the spring of 2020, I was packing to leave for two weeks in Colombia with my best friend to celebrate our 50th birthdays. We canceled our flights, thinking we were merely postponing till fall. It was disappointing, but I had plenty of other exciting travel on the horizon — or so I thought.

One of my favorite ways to travel is by teaching writing workshops in far-flung places — I love helping students articulate foreign experiences — and in the past year and a half, I had three workshops scheduled, all of which were canceled: first, a monthlong memoir class in Paris (that one really hurt), then a two-week workshop in Yelapa, Mexico, (co-teaching with legendary travel writer Tim Cahill) and, finally, a 10-day meditation and writing course in Katmandu. (This one has been postponed to fall of 2022. Fingers crossed!) Meanwhile, I haven’t left the country in two and a half years, making this the longest stretch I’ve gone without using my passport in 25 years. It feels odd and a bit unsettling. Travel is a big part of my livelihood, but it’s also what has always kept me sane and centered. It’s a spiritual and intellectual pursuit; when I travel, I return home a better me.

So I’ve had to reconcile with my travels turning exclusively domestic. In June of 2020, my family and I spent five days driving from our home in New Orleans to our summer place on Cape Cod. Since we weren’t comfortable with hotels, we camped. And though it wasn’t Paris, we stayed one night in Oak Mountain State Park in Alabama, and the next morning we had a gorgeous, bright-blue lake all to ourselves. Another night we rented a spot through Hipcamp on a farm in Virginia, next to a burbling stream, where we roasted marshmallows and gazed out our tent window at hundreds of fireflies. It was totally magical. And this summer, my best friend visited me on Cape Cod. It wasn’t Colombia, but we hiked over sand dunes and hung out with a great blue heron in the tidal flats and toasted to our 50th birthdays over lobster rolls and fried whole belly clams. And just a few weeks ago (when we had to evacuate for Hurricane Ida), my family flew to the wilds of Utah, where my sisters live. It wasn’t Nepal, but in a tiny, remote, beautiful town called Boulder, we hiked up and down red rocks, searched for petrified wood, sang songs in a slot canyon and ate zucchini fritters and bison steak at my sisters’ amazing restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill. 

I stopped pitching international travel stories a year and a half ago, because even though I’m vaccinated, I’m still not ready to travel internationally. Instead, I accepted a job co-writing “Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans 2022” — an assignment that’s reintroduced me to the city I live in, as it’s taken me to neighborhoods and businesses I never even noticed before. The conversations I’ve enjoyed with shopkeepers and museum docents and hoteliers have not only exponentially deepened my relationship to this city but have given me a meaningful travel experience. 

It’s weird to say, but I think somewhere along the way during the pandemic, I stopped dreaming of elsewhere. Instead, I craved connection, and these domestic trips have provided that in spades.