As I write this, we’re still in full-on pandemic mode. Although some cities and states are opening, slowly, it’s clear Covid-19 is still very much with us and very much a threat. But here I am, Publisher and Managing Editor of a digital magazine that’s about travel and no one can/should travel! That’s gotten me thinking. A lot. This pandemic and sheltering in place has smacked us all upside the head with what we take for granted. From how we spend time together, to how we work, eat, and SO many other things, we’ve had to pivot and find new ways to do them. In the “old days” (you know, a couple of months ago) if you needed to earn money, you went to your job. Want to grab a bite and a drink with a friend on a restaurant patio? The only problem was which of a multitude of restaurants you’d choose from? Need some time talking to Grandma to make sure she knows she’s loved and cared for? Head on over to her place. Travel is no exception – we always just assumed the destinations we wanted to travel to would be available to us whenever we wanted to go. Until they weren’t. So how do we look at travel in this “new normal”?

Photo from Pixabay.com

This week, I was supposed to be on a cruise in the Pacific Northwest. I was really looking forward to it, and the long weekend I’d spend in Seattle with my husband, afterword. We had lots of hopes and some concrete plans (now airline credits) for quite a bit of travel this summer too – all on hold. Like so many others, I just assumed the trips would happen like they always had. I took travel for granted.

While I could get very down about that, and a little panicky (seeing as how encouraging food and travel is my business), I remind myself that, as a result of this situation, the ability to, and opportunity to travel is a precious gift. And that has completely changed the way I look at travel and at my responsibilities to you, the readers of Real Food Traveler!

Think about it this way – It is truly amazing that we can basically sit in a chair and be transported (via car, train, boat, and plane) to another place where the sites, foods, traditions, accents, languages, and people are all different from us. We can get to know all of those things and, as is especially the focus of RFT, get to know them through the food and the people in a destination. And in the process, we bring a bit of their culture home with us. As this awful, shared pandemic has shown us, we find out how much we all have in common too and how small the world really is.

Photo by Barbara Rosner, Pixabay.

Access to the destinations of our dreams is no longer a given. Plus, considering how many precious lives have been lost due to Covid-19, we don’t dare pull out the old “Someday, when (fill in the blank with typical obstacles) happens, I’ll go to (destination of choice).” Someday might not come.

So for now, we go along, staying in so we can stay safe and keep others safe. And we get inspiration for travel, fantasize about where we will go, doing some research and even making some plans for the future.

Here’s the crux of why I wanted to write to you – we will revel in travel more than we ever have and we will be so grateful when we are able to go, appreciating every experience. We’ll know it wasn’t a given and that we can never take the joy and privilege of travel for granted again and that is our new normal.

Keep dreaming, keep planning, and keep reading Real Food Traveler for some help with that. We have many wonderful articles in the works. We will continue to bring the world to you, one bite at a time.

Door County, Wisconsin. Photo by Courtney Drake-McDonough

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