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 ...