Destinations In ‘Pandemic Protected’ Mode Make Staying At Home A Better Option. For Now

I am sitting here at my tiki bar desk – yes, my desk is a tiki bar – thinking that it’s long past time to do a blog post about traveling.
Normally this is easy for me because I am full of stories, but I could not think of anything or any place to write about right now. And that’s when it dawned on my why this is the case: I haven’t traveled anywhere in a while.
The last trip I took was back to my old stomping grounds of Hermosa Beach to do our shelved-for-the-moment PubClub LIVE, livestream show. We did that on location from Tower 12 bar & restaurant and, well, that’s on hold for now with bars being limited in this COVID-19 era.
And that was in a car anyway. The last plane trip was to see my family in East Tennessee for Christmas.
And quite frankly, I’ve lacked the motivation to travel. It’s not that I’m afraid to travel, even by air. I take precautions and have a pretty good instinct to be aware of my surroundings and the people in those surroundings.
It’s that any potential destination is in “pandemic protected” mode (that’s my own phrase I just came up with, by the way). Bars and restaurants are limited, people aren’t going out as much, attractions are closed or are not the same as in normal times and heck, many destinations won’t even let you go anywhere even if they allow you to go there in the first place.
Who in their right mind would go to Hawaii now? What’s the fun of being in paradise, only to be stuck in your hotel room the whole time. That would drive me nuts.
So for the moment, I’m enjoying being on vacation, so to speak, right here in San Diego. Tourists are starting to appear the past few weeks – I can tell because of all off a sudden families pedaling surreys are clogging up the sidewalk and bike path along the bay – and it’s next to impossible to get a table at the new Portside Pier restaurants that hang over the water. Unless you follow these PubClub get-a-table tricks, of course.
The Gaslamp Quarter outdoor dining scene is thriving, to I still find it ridiculous we have to order food in order to get a drink and heck you can’t even get a drink past about 10:30 because they places have to close so early.
San Diego isn’t the only place with these restrictive policies, of course, and that’s why I have little desire to travel right now. How about you?
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