Travel in a Time of Plague and Snow

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a hotel chain where I had signed up for free to get rewards so that I could have free wi-fi.  And now, some of those rewards are about to expire--but of course, they're always about to expire--and I got an e-mail offer of a great deal to go to Cancun.

To no one in particular, I quipped, "Who do you think I am, Ted Cruz?"

For those of us who read this post in later years, when all the hubub has died down, I'll remind us of the scandal of the day, everyone in every part of Texas affected with a winter storm, power out, water dwindling, and one of the Texas senators goes off to have a jolly time in a resort in Mexico.

Ted Cruz has always seemed to delight in being hated, but this seems supremely stupid, even for him.  Was he not feeling reviled enough?  He had to do this?

I've thought of people's social media despair at crowds of people traveling, at unmasked people in restaurants, at all the social media outrage at all the ways we're not behaving the way we should in the face of the pandemic.  I've thought of this as my sister-in-law has come for a visit.  I've thought of this as I've posted pictures.  I've thought of the pictures that others have posted.

What people might not realize from the pictures I've posted is that my visitors weren't staying in a guest room in our house.  We have a small cottage in the back yard--my sister-in-law lived there for five months, and she returned for a vacation.  It's not as fixed up as I would like, but we also didn't charge them to stay there, the way they would have had to pay for an AirBnB option.  When we spent time with them, we were outdoors and most of the time, we were 6 feet apart.  So we weren't sharing the same air very often.

And yes, I realize that there were still risks, and I'm not trying to minimize that.  As always, when I write in this blog or in my journal (as opposed to when I write poetry or fiction), I try to be honest, so that people coming after us will know how it really was.

It's strange to say goodbye to my sister-in-law and her significant other, strange to know what a different climate they fly back to today--it has been snowing in Memphis all week--strange to know that with the travel disruptions of the past week, they may have quite a lot of aggravations yet to come, outside of the usual aggravations of airline travel/airline travel in a time of pandemic and winter weather.