Nows and Forevers

I’m not planning to travel anywhere Memorial Day weekend. And it looks like that might be a good choice.

The post pandemic travel boom is set to heat up further this Memorial Day weekend, with AAA Travel forecasting 7.7% more travelers on the road, rails and air than in 2022.

And it goes on from there.

“This summer travel season could be one for the record books, especially at airports,” said AAA SVP Paula Twidale.

Airports could be the busiest they’ve been since 2005.

Yikes.

I took two sets of flights in 2022, both in the spring and summer, one overseas and the other domestically. My traveling back from the United Kingdom took place Memorial Day week, and it was a doozy. And that’s even with my booking my flights back home the day after Memorial Day to avoid the crowds.

That only worked a little. I got to where I was going, only a little later than I expected. But it was a stressful trip nonetheless.

Why? Flying from London to New York took up all the time I had planned, and I plan a lot. Whenever I can, I try to arrive at the airport two to three hours ahead of time and if I am going anywhere that requires a change in planes (and that’s relatively often, given I no longer live in New York), I try to leave an equal amount of time at least in between flights. Sure, that means that I wait around the airport longer and I also spend more time in total traveling.

But it’s better than missing a flight. I did that, years ago, due to weather, and it took a plane, train and two automobiles — plus a hotel room and a 30-hour odyssey — to get back from Chicago to New York after a flight from Dallas.

So I try to avoid that when I can.

Traveling since the end of the pandemic has had its own challenges. I flew the week after the mask mandate was removed — although I kept one on the whole time — but the volumes were so heavy that it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. There were a lot of people traveling in that late spring and summer of 2022, probably like me having waited until then to do so.

There were delays with the inbound jet at Heathrow, delays taxiing at JFK, delays at the baggage screening, delays at customs, delays at security. I had four hours’ in between flights, and I barely made my flight out of JFK back to my home city.

So this year, I stay home. I have another trip to do by the end of this year, related to a writing project I’m doing. I had planned to go earlier this spring, then postponed it near to the last minute. I’m only going to archives and libraries, so it doesn’t matter when I go. Traveling in the summer, and paying high rates for lodging and airfare, won’t make a spec of difference since I will barely see daylight.

And I’m OK with waiting.