Coronavirus: How Our Plans Are Changing Drastically

What a difference (less than) a week makes. Just five days ago I published a post explaining how coronavirus hadn’t affected our plans much yet but that there was the potential for things to change in the coming weeks and months.

Well, it took much less time for things to change than I thought it would. Both our immediate and ongoing plans are now changing significantly, so here’s both what’s happened and what’ll be happening.

Parents

We’d been planning for the last year for my parents to come and join us on the road trip for 6-7 weeks. As the days counted down to them arriving, I started getting more nervous for them. They’re both at much higher risk due to their age, so having them fly at this time didn’t seem so wise after all, despite me initially being relieved that UK citizens were exempted from the ban on European citizens flying into the US.

What made me even more nervous was a phone call we received a few days ago. I was woken by a call from the hotel’s front desk advising that another guest on our floor had been tested for coronavirus. They were self-isolating while they awaited the results of their test, but the hotel wanted to let us know and advised that we could cancel our stay and receive a refund for any nights we didn’t stay.

Shae and I looked at our options for moving elsewhere but ultimately decided to stay where we were. If anything, staying at that hotel was probably the safest place to be as they was incredibly good about cleaning everything – housekeeping staff and the rest of the hotel staff constantly wiped down any surfaces that anyone might have touched throughout the day, including walls and everything else.

A few days before my parents were due to arrive, I figured it’d be best for my parents not to visit. Not only would they be at risk when flying and traveling through airports, but they might now even be at risk by coming into contact with us. Learning more about coronavirus and the need to practice social distancing made it clear that having my parents traveling internationally just wasn’t a responsible thing to do. I chatted it over with Shae and we then arranged to Skype with my parents later that day as they were both busy at the time.

This was about 3am our time, so I dropped my parents an email explaining that I thought it’d be best for them not to visit; that way they could discuss what they wanted to do before we Skyped.

When we Skyped later that day they agreed that they shouldn’t come after all. As it turns out, the choice would’ve been taken out of our hands anyway because literally two minutes before we Skyped it was announced that UK citizens had been added to the US travel ban.

(Side note: we found out yesterday that the hotel guest tested negative for coronavirus.)

Our Immediate Plans

With my parents no longer coming, we needed to decide what to do. The plan is for them to visit at some point in the future if and when it’s safer for them to travel internationally again. As a result, we’re postponing visiting Utah, the Grand Canyon, etc. ourselves so that we can enjoy those with my parents.

Knowing that we should practice social distancing ourselves, Shae and I decided we should hole up somewhere for a few weeks to reduce how much contact we have with other people. We still had to head to Henderson, NV (just outside of Las Vegas) for a few days first because of some packages we’d had sent to the hotel we were due to be staying at. My parents had been due to fly into Las Vegas airport, which is why we’d booked a hotel near there. The packages included my passport, tax documents, a new credit card and more, so we didn’t want to ask the hotel to forward that on to us and risk having it get lost. We’d already tried to have it delivered to our hotel a couple of weeks ago but delivery wasn’t successful and had been returned to our mailbox.

We therefore arrived in Henderson last night and will be staying for three nights. After that, we’re heading back east a little way to spend 3.5 weeks in Albuquerque, NM. We’ll be staying at a Candlewood Suites which should help restrict our interactions with people.

We’ve booked a one bedroom suite, so Shae can teach in the living room at 5am rather than having to find another space to use in the hotel so as not to wake me up. Every room at a Candlewood Suites has a kitchen, so we can make our own meals which reduces the likelihood that we’ll need to eat out. That includes a full-sized fridge-freezer, so we can buy more food than usual to reduce how frequently we need to go to the grocery store.

Candlewood Suites as a brand doesn’t provide any kind of breakfast, while they also only provide full housekeeping once a week seeing as most people stay there for an extended period of time. That too should help reduce any unnecessary human interactions.

Despite staying in one place for a while, we’ll hopefully still get to experience the area a little. While we’ll avoid attractions like museums due to social distancing, we’re hoping there’ll be some hiking and similar outdoor activities that we can do. That could be tricky though – New Mexico has announced that they’re closing all their state parks until at least April 9, 2020. That covers pretty much our entire stay, so hopefully there’ll be some kind of other outdoor activities we can do.

Our Future Plans

It’s simply not responsible to continue traveling in the same way that we had been before the coronavirus outbreak. Moving every 5-7 days to a new hotel where we’d come into contact with people, eat at buffet breakfasts, etc. isn’t a great idea, nor is visiting museums, popular tourist attractions, etc. We’re therefore trying to decide how best to plan things going forward.

At the same time, we don’t just want to cancel the road trip. Our initial thoughts are to spend the next few months visiting states with lots of outdoor activities available’ that way we wouldn’t be coming into close contact with people as frequently. We were already planning on visiting Colorado and Montana after my parents went back to the UK at the beginning of May, so those still seem like good options given most of what we’d be doing would be outside anyway.

As for accommodation, we’ll likely stay at more Airbnbs in the coming months as that’ll help with social distancing. If we want to book any hotel stays, we’ll try to stay at brands that include a kitchen in every room, such as Candlewood Suites, Staybridge Suites, Home2 Suites, Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites, etc. Some of those provide a buffet breakfast, so we might decide to give those a miss and provide our own breakfast.

Flexibility

As much as I like to plan things out ahead of time, I don’t know how much of that we can do considering how quickly things are changing at the moment. Some cities and/or states might start imposing stricter curfews, lockdowns, quarantines, etc., so we might get caught up in that.

The good thing is that hotel chains and Airbnbs have introduced some pretty flexible cancellation policies due to COVID-19, even when having booked non-refundable accommodation. For example, quite a few of the Airbnbs we’d booked for when my parents were visiting were non-refundable, but we’ve been able to cancel those and get a full refund which has been helpful. So while it doesn’t seem worth booking too far ahead right now, it also wouldn’t necessarily do any harm doing that seeing as in most cases we could cancel without charge.

Final Thoughts

Shae and I – and my parents – are disappointed that they couldn’t travel to the US right now, but it was the right decision. It also sucks having to change our road trip plans for the coming months, but we need to be responsible and do our best to reduce how much we might inadvertently be spreading coronavirus.