At the end of each year, I like to reflect on travels from the past year and look ahead to trips in the new one. It’s a nice way to recap and categorize trips as well as prioritize upcoming trips. I mean after all, when someone asks me what kind of places are on my bucket list, I want to say “EVERYWHERE!” :-). Although 2020 has been a different kind of year in all sorts of ways, I figured I would still take time to do a recap, so this post will be recapping 2020 in travel, and next week I will be back with a post about what 2021 might look like in terms of travel for my family.
Early 2020: The Travel That Happened Forever Ago
It’s hard to believe now in December, but my family and I DID actually travel some in 2020! Yes, not only did we actually leave our house, but even the state!
For me, my first trip of 2020 was in January when I went my first ever MIT Mystery Hunt in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual competition held each year on MIT’s campus over Martin Luther King weekend. The hunt features more than 100 puzzles of many sorts. The kickoff had probably 1,000 people in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium with a legit wedding!
The team I was on (The Team Formerly Known As the Team Formerly Known As the Team To Be Named Later) had about 100 people on it and we were all holed up in the Le Meridien Cambridge hotel for the weekend. I had an amazing time and our team finished I believe 4th.
Later in January, I went to Las Vegas for a work meetup (the company I work for was already fully remote pre-pandemic, so they have / had annual in-person meetups). While Vegas is not really my scene, it was a fun trip nonetheless.
In February my wife and daughter went out to California to visit family in Sacramento and were there for a few days.
The 2020 Trips That Were Canceled
And then… March :-). I’ve mentioned this to several people in the past few months, but it’s funny looking back to remember how up in the air all of this was in early to mid-March. We had a family trip to Hawaii planned, leaving Tuesday, March 17. On March 2, I was not planning on canceling it or any of my trips. But in the week before our planned departure, as COVID-19 started becoming more and more of a thing (at least in the U.S.), my wife and I went back and forth trying to decide if we should cancel. My mom was planning on coming to stay with one of my kids who wasn’t going, and she called up saying she was getting nervous about it.
We talked about what to do, and back then, I remember not being as concerned about catching it and getting sick, but more about the things that we couldn’t control. What happens if someone we happen to fly with or come into contact with gets sick and they quarantine our whole plane? Or what happens if Hawaii shuts down and we can’t get back home when we’re expecting to? In the end, on March 13, 4 days before we were supposed to fly, we canceled our trip. The kids were disappointed. Heck, *I* was disappointed — Hawaii is the only state I haven’t been to, and I STILL haven’t been there!
Looking back, of course that was the right decision and even had we gone, I doubt we’d have been able to stay the whole time we were planning or do all the things we anticipated. It was really when the NBA and March Madness shut down that it all started getting real.
Of course, it didn’t (and hasn’t) stopped there. We canceled pretty much everything that we had planned in 2020. Thankfully, I was able to get almost all of my miles, points and cash back. Only in a very few cases did I have to end up taking a loss. We had planned a trip to Europe with my dad and my sister, a family trip to Yosemite, and I’m sure we would have planned even more had 2020 gone in a different direction.
2020 Trips We Did End Up Taking
We have taken 2 more:
- July – We took a long weekend and drove to an Airbnb in Northern Michigan. It was great to just get out of the house and hit the beach for a few days in a place where we could be mostly by ourselves and stay distanced from others.
- September – My son left home to serve a two-year church mission in Portland, Oregon, and he and I flew out there to drop him off. Thankfully the West Coast had stopped being on fire. While there, I took a few days to road trip by myself and visited 38 new counties, my only new counties of 2020. That (visiting at least 1 new county) is something I have done every year for the past 23 years. You can see the area I visited in medium blue, along with that annoying white hole in California that was supposed to be plugged up by our Yosemite trip
Looking Ahead to Travel in 2021
So…. now what? We’ll cover in next week’s post what my plans are for 2021, but as of now, I don’t have anything booked. I am cautiously optimistic that we will be able to get back to some traveling, at least in the latter half of the year. And I’ve got plenty of miles and points saved up to do it!
What about you? How did 2020 look for you in terms of travel taken vs. canceled?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
2020 saw 2 cruises, 2 family reunions, 1 travel club meeting and 3 other domestic trips cancelled. The only trip taken was 1 early 2020 cruise with 7 cancelled ports (which luckily my SO bailed on). That trip ended with the need for stateside travel contact due to forced flight rescheduling stemming from a hasty, mandatory evacuation from South Africa through ADD and IST right before IST shut down. So far no plans for travel in 2021 until September and all even then flight, cruise and hotel bookings are completely refundable.
That sounds about par for the course! Like you, I don’t have anything booked yet for 2021 and when I do I will be focusing on refundability. Thankfully the policies of many airlines and hotels have gotten much better in that regard
Fortunately, I was able to take separate trips to New Zealand in 1/20 and Australia in 2/20 and I happened to have already scheduled a trip to Hawaii 3/12/20 -3/17/20, which I took. Everything on the streets in HNL seemed fairly normal, restaurants were full, etc., although with 6 diagnosed cases recently being made in Hawaii, things were starting to feel a bit ominous. Mostly, I’m just glad I got to visit AUS and NZ. Who knows when the next chance will come. For now, I’m just booking award trips with fingers crossed, knowing there will be more trip cancellations to come. Hoping to visit Normandy 10/21.
In January my husband and I took a cruise to celebrate our 50th birthdays. I’m so glad we did that. It was strange, just weeks later, to see one of that ship’s sister ships in the news for having no place that would accept it for docking, because passengers had been hit with the virus.
We’ve missed planned 2020 trips to the Canadian Rockies, Boston, Vermont, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Denver. Also a Europe trip that I had in my head for the fall but had not, fortunately, yet made reservations for . . . Here’s to a safe, healthy, and travel-filled 2020 for all of us.
Trip to visit family in Olympia, WA (flying Houston to Seattle) rescheduled from April to July, then cancelled with funds in e-certificates
Trip for a high school reunion Houston to Baltimore in September, cancelled because the organizers rescheduled to 2021
We did take a driving trip Houston to Dallas in November to visit relatives.
Bookending the year with driving trips to North Carolina. Had one other trip to Utah/Idaho (flying) that we did end up taking. Lots of work travel was cancelled, as well as a couple trips to visit the grandson and an international trip we had planned for the summer.
We were able to take two trips before things shut down for COVID…one in January to Disneyland (and dinner at Club 33–bucket list item) and one in February to Walt Disney World. We had to cancel a family reunion cruise in September. Looking forward to 2021 with a few trips in the plans.
Two air trips cancelled. Houston to Seattle in April first rescheduled to July, then cancelled in June. Both United and Alaska issues full refunds via electronic certificates for future travel. Then a trip to Baltimore scheduled for September also cancelled because the event was reschedule to 2021. Again, an
e-certificate issued by United.
We did travel by car to visit relatives in Dallas in November, with another driving trip there Dec 31 – Jan 3.