Virtual travel

Sometime last spring I went to soccer practice and Sherman was there. I asked after Bobby, his son, and Sherman said he was in Utah or Idaho or something: "But why anybody would want to be anywhere other than here at this time of year is beyond me." Or something like that. And I got it. It was in fact a beautiful, mild spring day, with flowers blooming and leaves budding, and we were out on the soccer field having fun. What indeed could be better?

This year the spring has been even nicer and consistently milder. Weather-wise it obviously couldn't be better. But we have really had not choice about travel. Nobody has been going anywhere, by a decree supported by as well-reasoned a public health thought process as could be hoped, given the lightning speed with which this disease has advanced and the fact that we've been figuring it out in real time.

As I'm sure I've written elsewhere on the blog, sometime about my early 30s I came to have a feeling I was traveled out, that there were real limits to what I could gain as a person through further galavanting around the globe individually. This feeling has waxed and waned as the years of marriage and parenting have progressed. For business reasons I've had to travel some on my own, and I think a little of that has been useful and fruitful in terms of keeping my eyes open and attuned to the variety of modern experience and the way the world has been changing. I have seen some great stuff, but not that much. It's not as fruitful as traveling when I was young.

Traveling with my family is another story. I have had great trips with the whole crew, even though the logistics wrangling of it all is occasionally a pain in the ass. But showing the kids the world is wonderful, and even watching Mary delight in pointing her camera at things incessantly has its rewards.

Right about now, I will admit, I am ready to hop on a plane or in my car and go somewhere. I was scheduled to go out to Seattle and SF in early March but I pulled the plug on that trip just as the shutting down was getting serious.

Yesterday morning I went to a Zoom AA meeting that I've been going to for the last few months. It was nice to see familiar faces, but I got to thinking how the current moment would let me attend AA meetings in different places. Why Chapel Hill? Why not Iowa or New Mexico or, for that matter, Liverpool or Nizhnyi Novgorod? I have often thought about how one of the great things about AA is that it provides you with a set of rooms and social contexts in which one is welcome anywhere, and therefore it makes a very different kind of travel possible. In principle, I can go anywhere, walk into a meeting and sit down as a full-fledged participant. I've always hoped to do some AA travel, perhaps even on a bicycle. Now might be the time to do it, albeit on a laptop instead.