New Year, New Travel Tech (Premium)

What a difference a pandemic makes: With our vaccinations scheduled, we’ve started plotting some long-delayed travel. Tied to that are some equally long-delayed purchases that may interest you. None if particularly life-changing. But each, in its own way, is a bet that the future could be something close to normal again.

We’ll see how that goes. But as of today, everyone in my direct family has received at least one vaccination, and my second vaccination is scheduled for this coming Tuesday. But the bigger concern, from a scheduling perspective, is the rest of the family. We won’t travel on a plane until everyone is fully vaccinated, and we probably won’t travel as a family until late summer at the earliest.

But my wife and I aren’t going to wait for that. We had been waiting for her to get her first vaccination, which happened just this past Wednesday, so we could figure out the earliest date that we could fly. That requires a bit of math: Her second vaccination isn’t until April 28, and you’re supposed to wait a few weeks before its effects are fully realized, which puts us at mid-May.

But May is going to be a busy month. We’ll be collecting our daughter early in the month to bring her home after her first year at college in North Carolina. My son is graduating from college in mid-May, and we’re hoping to be able to attend the graduation ceremony in person. And then our friends in Boston have scheduled a long weekend get-together for late May. As much as we’re eager to really fly again---all three of those events will be drives, not flights---there’s just too much going on.

So June it is, then.

June isn’t as busy as May, but we do have two minor league baseball games scheduled for the first half of the month. We normally buy a 9-game package for the local team, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, but we obviously couldn’t attend any games last year, and this season has gotten off to a weird start with lotteries for game tickets for the first few months. I wouldn’t have personally factored baseball games into my travel decisions---traveling is a lot more important to me than a baseball game---but my wife wants to attend the two games, so now June has turned into the second half of June. Fair enough.

As for the “where” of this equation, we’ve long wanted to expand past Europe, and given the situation there now, 2021 is sort of forcing the issue. So we chose Mexico City: It’s a 5-hour direct flight from Newark and we had more than enough flight credits from our COVID-cancelled 2020 trip to Paris (for our 30th anniversary) to pay for the tickets. Indeed, compared to European travel, the Mexico City flights were reasonable regardless. We scheduled the trip for five nights, from June 17 to June 22.

I hope it happens. After all, there are worrying signs of a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections, and we’re collectively tired of the lockdown and many are letting down their guard. But I also believ...