Item

Cross Country Move During the Pandemic

Title (Dublin Core)

Cross Country Move During the Pandemic

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

In the spring of 2020, my sister finished up her post-doctoral program and needed to find a job. Unfortunately, if job hunting wasn't hard enough, the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and in-person interviews were canceled as companies went remote. After a number of Zoom interviews later, she landed a job. The only issue - that job was in California, a state that had responded to the pandemic with some of the strictest restrictions.
In July, the moving truck was loaded, we hopped into our cars and began the two-day drive from Texas to California. We had originally planned to take the southern I-10 route through New Mexico, but before we left, we learned New Mexico had implemented a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering the state. Since we weren't 100% sure if that applied to people just passing through, we decided to go the more northern route staying the night in Colorado and Nevada. While both hotels we stayed at assured us they'd taken extra precautions cleaning the rooms, we followed the CDC-suggested guideline of bringing cleaning supplies and wiping down hard surfaces when we got our rooms. I'm a bit of a germaphobe, and this was the first time no one gave me funny looks when I entered a hotel with a can of Lysol wipes.
Overall, besides wearing a mask in public, the road trip to California was similar to road trips pre-pandemic. Things got a little bit more restrictive as we got into Redwood City. Unlike in Texas, masks were required indoors and outdoors if other people were nearby. Since it was a lot cooler in California, I was mostly fine with that requirement. With most indoor attractions either closed or open only to a reservation, we decided we'd go to the beach while we waited for the moving truck to arrive. Apparently that was a popular idea, so it was hard to find a part of the beach without people around so we could take our masks off.
Besides the mask mandate, the only other restriction that impacted our trip to California was that California had closed indoor dining, so all our meals had to be eaten curbside or to-go. We found a few restaurants with outdoor seating, but mostly it was easier just to get take-away and eat it on the floor of my sister's new apartment.
Since we weren't flying and we really weren't in California to do tourist activities, traveling wasn't that difficult. However, while it wasn't difficult, it was terrifying. Our trip to California was pretty early in the pandemic, and there wasn't a lot known about Covid-19 yet. Additionally, there were countless stories on the news about people ending up in the hospital and dying from the virus. If we hadn't needed to move my sister in 2020, I don't think I would have traveled at that time. In fact, even as information came out about Covid-19 over the following months and years, I still wasn't comfortable traveling. My first trip since moving my sister was actually just this past June.

Date (Dublin Core)

July 14, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Self

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Rachel Doney

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

Photograph

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Health & Wellness
English Travel
English Home & Family Life
English Social Distance

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

Zoom
California
Texas
moving
CDC

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

History of Tourism

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Tourism story for the COVID-19 Archive

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

07/17/2023

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

07/25/2023
10/16/2023
11/13/2023

Date Created (Dublin Core)

07/14/2020

Item sets

Covid 19

This item was submitted on July 17, 2023 by Rachel Doney using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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