I find myself trolling the news websites to get a better sense of the pandemic internationally. My usual go-to sites are the BBC and The Guardian. Catalan closed down, the UK has gone to a tiered system, Liverpool is higher tiered and London is lowered tiered, France is in lockdown, and the Czech Republic seems to have shut its borders. Australia is reeling from a recent spike in cases and Switzerland has eliminated specific countries from visiting! And all of this happened within the last 48 hours.
And I thought to myself, that travel is much more resilient than all of this noticias. Travel will endure. Honestly, if the explorers could get on a boat the size of my shoe and spend two years trying to find the spice kingdom by going the wrong way, then these times will be overcome.
Yes, there has been a lot of tragedy. This pandemic will be something we tell our kids and our kids’ kids about. But the world will move on and we will too. The other day, I wondered if the pause in pollution that this had permitted was some divine way to give us a few more years of sanity before the horror of climate change eventually envelops us. We have an election and Brexit and corruption and still the world spins. I may have missed a vacation or two over the past eight months, but at some point, a new normal will come into being.
I was thinking all of this as I stared at the fabulous dance poster in my office of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It’s a black and white contact sheet that has been blown up. My dad loved the Fred and Ginger movies and we watched them every Sunday in the wintertime in England. There is a great line from one of the songs in the movies that sort of sums it up: “There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s music and laughter and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.”
Love that song. Love travel. Who doesn’t? Let the good times roll.