What I Use: Charlotte, North Carolina 2021 (Premium)

It’s been an interesting few months of tentative travel after spending most of the previous year stuck in and near my home. My first tentative post-vaccination trip was a long weekend in Washington D.C. back in March, which I wrote about. And then similar trips to the Boston area and New York City, which I did not. During that time period, I received my second vaccination, and then my wife and kids were all vaccinated twice as well. We’re ready for the future.

These early post-vaccination trips were curiously similar in that they all involved driving, not flying, and were to places which we know well. It is interesting to me that, through no specific plan or agreement, my wife and I very specifically revisited places with which we were already familiar instead of trying anything new. It has, after all, been well over a year since we’ve been able to visit these places safely. But since those trips, I discovered that this is a normal human condition: As CNN reported recently, this sense of familiarity helps to reassert a sense of normalcy after a year that was, by any measure, completely out of whack.

Part of this return to normalcy, for me, has been rediscovering time-honed travel skills that had fallen by the wayside during the pandemic. Packing light, for example. And evaluating what was brought and not used on trips and then rejiggering what I bring for the next trip. And so on.

We made mistakes, of course. Lots of them. When we went to New York, for example, I forgot my gadget bag, in which I take an extension cord and power port expander, various cables, small coffee packets, and the like. And survived that because it was just one night and now all my key electronics—my laptop, iPad Air, and smartphone, are powered over USB-C, so my laptop charger worked for everything. We also bent the rules a bit: Since these trips were all by car, we could bring more and engage in that “what if…” line of thinking that is an anathema to the light travelers we normally are.

With this past weekend’s trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, to pick up our daughter at UNC Charlotte after her first year of college, we ticked off yet another important (to us) post-vaccination milestone: Our first airplane flight in over 15 months. If you think back to when we brought our daughter Kelly to college, at the end of September 2020, things were very different. The pandemic was still very much in full swing here in the United States, and Kelly’s school opened three weeks later than usual. That trip was all driving, of course, and because of the length of the drive between here and there—about 8.5 hours one-way—we split the driving up by visiting Asheville, North Carolina after we dropped her off. And then we stayed at a hotel in Virginia on the way home to make the whole thing more manageable.

This time around, things have changed. In addition to all of us being vaccinated, Kelly completed a full year of school without any drama or health issues, her school surprisingly having weathered COVID-19 effectively. But this is also a very busy month of travel for us, itself an unfamiliar problem. We visited the Boston area in late April so my wife could visit her parents in the wake of a health scare, and for the first time in a year and a half. We went to New York City when we did so we could complete our Global Entry appointment, which was first approved in late 2019 right before the pandemic. And this coming weekend, we’re heading to Rochester, New York—a 4.5-hour drive—for our son’s graduation. So we needed to minimize the time we spent getting Kelly. And that meant that driving both ways was out of the question. It meant that we’d need to fly.

But only in one direction: Kelly took an SUV-sized load of stuff with her to college, and she needed to bring that back home. And so the plan that we came up with was that my wife and I would fly to Charlotte, rent an SUV, and drive the three of us home the next day. And this meant that we would need to practice what we preach when it comes to packing light and traveling efficiently. You know, exercise some muscles that had long gone soft.

It went pretty well, I think. My wife is able to travel a lot lighter than I can in part because she’s a lot smaller than I am, and I semi-resent that she’s able to get fly with just a single bag, a floppy backpack, where I need to take a larger piece of rolling luggage and a laptop bag. (She’s done this multiple times flying to Europe, too, of which I am particularly jealous.)

Regardless, I have a strict carry-on rule, and I will never check a bag when I travel unless it’s imposed on me by an airline. To ensure I can do so, I buy luggage that meats the smaller and stricter requirements of small European airlines, even when flying domestically. And so I’ve stuck by my beloved Rick Steves Ravenna Rolling Case, despite a few issues with zippers and internal straps: It measures 21 x 14 x 9 inches, including the wheels, and I can carry it on even the smallest planes. I could have gone smaller as I only needed to pack a single day’s worth of clothes.

As for my laptop bag, I purchased a larger HP bag for a presumed future home swap when I need to bring at least two laptops. But for this flight, I stuck with my familiar (and much smaller) Rick Steves Velocé Shoulder Bag and brought just the basics.

Those basics include a laptop, my iPad Air, my recently-purchased Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, a charging cable, and something I’d not traveled with in 15 months, a JetBlue blanket that I use to make hard and thin airline armrests more comfortable.

This was also my first experience flying from the Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, which is just 20 minutes from our home. Doing so has been a goal of mine since we moved to Pennsylvania four years ago, but this was my first time: I could never figure out flights that made sense for work travel since I very much prefer direct flights and what flights I could get were too expensive. But the Charlotte flight was direct (and short) and inexpensive.

This airport is laughably small and only 30 minutes elapsed from the moment we left our house until we were at the gate. Thanks to Global Entry/TSA Pre, I didn’t have to take anything out of my bags at security, and there was no line anyway, so we walked straight through.

The plane was tiny, of course, a 2×2 configuration, and my hair brushed the top of the plane when I walked to our exit rows seats. My luggage, as noted, met the carry-on requirements in each dimension, but I was still asked to gate-check it. Normally, I’d refuse, and I saw later that the bins inside the plane were almost all empty. But this was our first time flying in a while, we were in no particular rush, and it was a short flight. I was OK with it. This time.

I took dozens of photos during the takeoff, the flight, and the landing, like a child. It was just so nice to be airborne again.

And thanks to the exit row seats, I was able to spread out, open up the laptop—an HP Spectre x360 14 I’m overdue reviewing—and get some work done. (Yes, I wrote a good chunk of the review.)

I had remembered to download some music to my phone the day before, which is a bit surprising, so I was able to listen to my usual combination of U2 and Pink Floyd on the flight, using those Bose earbuds for only the second time in a noisy environment. (The first time being a train heading into New York City on a previous trip.) They worked wonderfully, and I asked my wife to test them as well, and had her bring the Samsung Galaxy Buds+ I use at the gym because they offer some passive noise reduction. She seems to think the noise reduction is similar on both, but I don’t think she had a good enough test of the Bose earbuds. Either way, I feel very strongly about using noise reduction on flights, and the Bose passed the test.

Well, aside from one little caveat. Partway through the flight, my wife inadvertently popped one of the circular little Buds+ earbuds out of her ear and it went rolling away under the seats. She recovered it pretty quickly, but I made the mistake of making fun of her. And then promptly did the same thing with one of the Bose earbuds, which are black and were even harder to find under the seat. This is a curious problem with earbuds, which are otherwise much more convenient than wired headphones. Hm.

Anyway, we arrived safely in Charlotte, and even landed 45 minutes early, which is odd given that the flight time was supposed to be just over 2 hours. The Charlotte airport is wonderful if you’ve not been, it’s big, modern, and easy to navigate. I took this assuming photo of a Burger King kiosk we walked by. Because, you know. Windows 10.

We needed a medium-sized SUV for Kelly’s stuff, and had rented a Mazda CX-5 “or similar,” and given my past experience with Mazda vehicles, I was hoping we got the former and not the latter, and we did. It was quite nice overall. Aside from some anemic acceleration issues (and the accompanying engine whine; sorry, we usually drive a BMW), it was a great vehicle.

It lacked Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (I assume because it was a cheap rental car configuration) and had a curiously wide and thin display, but the technology in this vehicle was first-rate, from the anti-crash tech to the Bluetooth audio, which was much nicer than the bare-bones functionality in our car. The rear camera was notably crisp and clear, too, again, compared to what we’re used to.

We headed directly to Kelly’s dorm to say hi to our daughter before one of her finals, so that was a nice reunion.

Then, we headed back to the hotel to check-in, and then had dinner in Charlotte at a place called Tupelo Honey, a favorite southern food chain.

Charlotte is a beautiful small city, and I can imagine living there.

But we didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to explore on this trip, so we then checked another milestone off our list by having a drink at the hotel bar, and then watched a comedian on Netflix on the iPad Air before we went to bed.

The next morning, we braced ourselves for a long day of driving. We headed back to UNC Charlotte, and brought Kelly’s stuff out to the car in shifts.

And then I used my Tetris skills to pack it all in with just enough room at the top to see out the back. We left UNC Charlotte at 9:05 am and were told by Google to expect to arrive home by 6:30 pm. As always, my aim was to lower that timeframe a bit even though I know we’d need 2-3 stops for food, gas, and general leg stretching.

The drive was mostly uneventful. North Carolina, most of Virginia, and central Pennsylvania—plus tiny slivers of West Virginia and Maryland—are beautiful to drive through, and we had terrific weather for most of the trip. Sometime in Pennsylvania, however, the clouds and rain arrived, and by the time we had picked up our car at the airport in Allentown, it was pouring. We arrived home at 6:30, though we would have done so 20 minutes earlier had we gone straight home. Door to door, it was almost exactly 9.5 hours.

Looking back on this, I feel like the short, one-way flight was a great reintroduction to the air travel to come, and that this “baby steps” approach will aid in the transition to normalcy. I would have preferred more time for this trip, of course, but, again, it’s a busy month. But looking out, we have other milestones to check off in the months ahead, including our first post-vaccination international flight, to Mexico City in June. And then our long-delayed 30th anniversary trip to Paris, which we just rescheduled to late October. We still need to figure out a trip with the kids this summer as well.

We’ll get there. In the meantime, I feel like we’re making progress. And while yesterday’s drive was tiring—I drove the entire way and spent last night collapsed on the couch before going to bed—I was happy to do it. I’m happy it’s over, too.