Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/N3EWVeGvyLfWE1iG7
Honestly, quarantine has been nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Got back to Long Island in the end of March and have basically been stuck at home for the past three months. Including my parents and sister, I have physically interacted with a grand total of 14 people since I got back – 2 friends from high school, 2 friends from college in NYC, my uncle and aunt in NJ, and 2 families that have come over to our backyard for dinner. I’ve also left the house (not including our backyard, where we setup a badminton net and I play my sister most evenings) a total of 9 or 10 times, and have not worn PJs or gym clothes on like 7 or 8 times in total. To be completely honest, my glory days of playing ~6 hours of video games every day of the week in high school is really serving me well now.
The two things that have really triggered my desire to travel have been my family history of travelling while growing up, and my love of history. In fact, my biggest regret of college was not being a history major and instead majoring in Math to get the sacred STEM degree. My interest in history is actually directly correlated to video games – I played the shit out of a WW2 multiplayer eastern front shooter game in high school, Red Orchestra: Ostfront. According to Steam, I have 650+ hours in this, (of which almost all is from high school), and Steam only started tracking hours in March of my sophomore year so the real number is probably closer to 1200. It’s because of this that I have always found German and Russian history to be the most interesting, and going down wiki rabbit holes from this got me interested in broader European history. I pretty much did no schoolwork in middle and high school so spent my weekdays playing RO on my computer or Madden on my Gamecube.
I got a PS4 Pro to help me tide through quarantine, so have been playing a ton – all four Uncharted games + Lost Legacy, The Last of Us (just the 1st one), No Man’s Sky, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Also been playing a ton of Europa Universalis IV on my 9 year old laptop that I got just after graduating high school back in 2011. Uncharted is basically an Indiana Jones video game and sort of helped with the FOMO of not travelling by featuring lost cities and things of that nature, while Kingdom Come, a game set in medieval Bohemia (a region of modern day Czechia) has helped rekindle my interest in Europe. I’ve honestly been more engaged/less bored during quarantine than I was in Chicago, and while it obviously does suck to not be able to travel, playing video games all day certainly beats working. The biggest gut punch so far was probably Burning Man being cancelled.
I’ve also cleared the incredibly low bar (arguably more of a hole in the ground than a bar) of getting into the best shape of my life. Weirdly enough, my main motivation to work out every day has been so that I don’t die when I eventually make it to trek up Mount Nyiragongo in the DRC, which is probably up there with Iran as the place that I want to visit the most. We have an elliptical in the basement so I’ve been using that, plus pushups and these core exercise videos my sister got me into which were brutal at first but now much more manageable, so it’s nothing crazy.
My family and I did make it out and drove out to NYC a couple of times before all the protests (#ACAB), once during the day and once at night. It was definitely super eerie to see New York basically abandoned. It actually reminded me a lot of the Loop in Chicago after 8pm or during the day on a weekend… a ton of skyscrapers and a quintessential city skyline with literally no one around. I never realized just how small Times Square is, and it just seemed even more fake and artificial with no one around. Sort of like how I found Monaco was a fake “this is how Europe is supposed to look like” city, Times Square was like “Welcome to America” designed for foreigners, and the lack of crowds brought out the artificial nature even more. But in general, the empty streets definitely made me appreciate New York more.
So I have a big roadtrip planned, which hopefully doesn’t get curtailed due to COVID. Flying out at 7am on June 28th with my friend Steve to Phoenix, and we’re going to be renting a car and driving to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Vegas (for the 4th), Palm Springs (for Joshua Tree…this is where I stayed for Desert Trip with my dad back in 2016!), and then he flies out of San Diego on July 8 so he has time for a quick quarantine with a week+ to spare before his sister in law is due. My plan is then to drive up the coast from San Diego to San Francisco, and see Yosemite and Redwood national parks while in the Bay Area. My flight back home is booked for July 20 right now. Hopefully will be able to meet up with Burning Man friends in California, and I’m staying with my cousin and his wife in the Bay Area – this was the wedding I went to last summer just before Burning Man, so it’s sort of a nice circle in what is almost my 1 year anniversary of retirement. Not sure on what I’ll do after this trip but as of now, it looks like Hawaii or Alaska might be decent options, but we’ll see when we get there.