After spending a day in Dallas–Fort Worth with my assistant Monica, I headed out with her to our final destination in Florida.

Luckily, The Club DFW was open, so we were able to swing by the airport lounge to grab some food. I did a quick overview of airport lounges during the pandemic in my blog post from when I traveled to New York City, and the idea in Dallas was pretty much the same—a lot of seating areas are blocked off to force social distancing, there’s a lot of plexiglass separating employees from clients, and the buffet area was converted to a restaurant-style ordering process.

The Club DFW was also one of the more intriguing airport lounges I’ve been to. The layout was a little strange, and it felt more like it was three micro-lounges in close proximity, rather than an actual real lounge.

Upon boarding our flight, I discovered that Monica is actually 80 years old when she whipped out her knitting kit and started knitting a scarf for one of her players while on the flight.

I opted to do things that were more fitting for our age, like use the in-flight wifi and take pictures out the window.

After just shy of three hours, we made it to our destination, Orlando, Florida.

It was an intriguing sight flying into Florida, because I had never seen so much swampland in my life. Seeing as I call Las Vegas home, and flying into the Las Vegas Valley involves flying over endless barren desert, it was weird looking out the window and seeing so many shades of green and blue.

Unfortunately, because I’m here for a sensitive human resources matter, I can’t really provide many details on what’s going on. But, in my free time, I tried to do some sightseeing.

If you’ve taken a look at the news lately, you may have heard that Florida is one of the hotspots of the spread of COVID-19. Being here first-hand, I can definitely see why that is. For some reason, Floridians are almost acting as if there isn’t really a global pandemic.

I decided to check out Lake Minneola, which is out in the Orlando suburbs and somewhat near where my lodging is. It actually looked surprisingly similar to Illinois, where I grew up, and Wisconsin, where I went to university.

I saw about 40 people, only two of which were wearing face coverings, both of whom had their masks on their chins, so I opted to just look at things from inside the rental car, and then just flee.

Florida is wild.

When the pandemic first broke out, I had a burning urge to travel everywhere because of how cheap airline tickets were. But, for the sake of the greater good of humanity, I decided not to travel—the United States was not well-equipped to handle COVID-19, and me moving around would only serve as a vessel for COVID-19 to transfer to others. I stayed at home and quarantined, just like (almost) everyone else.

Now that we’re months into the pandemic, people are responding appropriately to minimize the coronavirus’ virality. It is commonplace for everyone to wear masks, hand sanitizer is plentiful, and most people distance themselves from others as much as possible. Even though the wave of cheap airline tick­ets is now gone (seeing as the supply shrunk drastically to accommodate for the decreased demand, and pricing has readjusted), I figured now is no longer considered a maximum-risk time period to travel anymore.

If you’ve been keeping up with my other blog posts, you know that I’ve traveled back and forth a few times to SoCal to visit Tempo‘s studio and team house, but those were road trips. This was my first flight since traveling to PAX East in early March 2020.

 
My adventure starts at my condo, where I called an Uber. Usually, I find a ride within several seconds and my ride arrives within a few minutes—one of the perks of living on the Las Vegas Strip. For this trip, I guess there were so few Ubers available at 10:30 AM PDT that it took several minutes for my app to finally find a driver, then an estimated 14 minutes for arrival… which ended up being closer to 20 minutes.

After I got to the airport, the environment I felt is something that I had never experienced before at an airport. It wasn’t completely empty, but it was obviously nowhere near where it usually is.

I received an email from Delta alerting me that McCarran International Airport’s wait times were higher than usual and that I should arrive at least two hours before my flight, but when I got to TSA PreCheck, I was the only one there and I was in and out of screening within a couple minutes.

The best way that I can describe the mood of the airport is “apocalyptic.” People were wearing masks and distancing away from each other, but that def­i­nite­ly wasn’t the reason for the strange environment—most people were doing this everywhere else in Las Vegas too, but nowhere else that I had been to had this vibe to it. It felt almost as if everyone had no more energy left, and everyone was waiting for the world to end.

A vast majority of the stores were closed and barred shut. People on the airport slot machines seemed to have a zombie-like glaze in their eyes, as if they were gambling away their money because there wasn’t going to be anything else for them to spend their money on after the world ends. There was usu­ally a subtle sense of rush in the air, but this time, it felt like everyone was moving at a normal pace, something very out of the ordinary for an airport.

The lounge was still open in Concourse D, so I stopped by The Club at LAS with my Priority Pass Select to grab some free food before my flight. Normally, the lounge has a buffet-style food retrieval set-up, but in order to avoid people from coming into contact with others’ food, they converted it to a restaurant style where employees collect and distribute food on your behalf.

Boarding the flight was also a different experience than usual. Normally, people are prompted to board by group, which generally goes by order of loy­al­ty status and upgrades, before calling the main cabin, and saving basic economy for last. However, this time around, first class was still first to board, while everyone else boarded in reverse order of seat row number, presumably to minimize the number of people who would have to walk past other already-seated people, thus minimizing potential contact.

The flight itself was pretty empty. I had a Delta Comfort+ seat in row 11, and I had the whole row to myself, in addition to row 10 being empty. I took advantage of this by reclining back and stretching my leg out into row 10, constructing my own makeshift business class seat. (I fell asleep like this and woke up with terrible lower back pain, so maybe this wasn’t actually really the greatest idea.)

In-flight service was also a bit different. Instead of coming around for regular drinks and snacks, the flight attendants had pre-bagged kits available that contained some Cheez-Its, a granola snack, bottled water, a napkin, an advertisement, and hand sanitizing wipes. I was in the section of the plane that re­ceives free alcohol (though I don’t drink alcohol so I didn’t actually order any), but I was never offered a selection of any drinks apart from alcohol, so it was ultimately inconclusive as to whether or not standard soft drink service was even available.

After a surprisingly quick flight of about four and a half hours, I made it to my destination, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was a little after 8 PM EDT when I arrived, but the airport was already pretty empty—almost as if midnight had decided to relocate itself four hours earlier on the clock. However, JFK didn’t have that eerie apocalyptic feel to it like LAS did; it just felt like a calm airport with not many people.

And thus was my experience traveling in the middle of a global pandemic.

I realize I’m not setting the best example by choosing to travel for non-essential, leisurely purposes, and I encourage you to avoid doing what I did. How­ever, if you choose to do so anyway, make sure you wear a face covering, regularly wash and sanitize your hands, stay away from other people, avoid mak­ing unnecessary contact with unsanitary surfaces, and just be conscious and aware that you do not do anything stupid that may compromise the health of those around you.

Because the team house is up in the Hills, the parking is naturally a bit difficult. The road leading up to the property is narrow, and street parking is very limited. If we try really hard and none of our neighbors take any street parking spots, we can squeeze in a maximum of eight vehicles, two of which would be barricaded in.

Of course, on one of the days that we had a few producers and writers at the house holding an ideation session, an electrician, the gardener, the pool cleaner, and a pest control company came, virtually all at the same time… and then the landlord showed up to help coordinate and make sure everyone was doing their job.

Needless to say, I was very much barricaded into the back of the garage by two vehicles, and we were still running out of parking spaces, with some cars now just randomly sitting there in the middle of the road. Obviously, I couldn’t go out for my daily food run, so I decided to order delivery.

With COVID-19 stay-at-home orders loosening, the traffic around the Los Angeles area is increasing, so it took about 50 minutes for my food to arrive. By that time, exactly two people had finished their work and left the house. Which two people? The two people who were barricading me in. My truck was now free to exit, and I didn’t have to order delivery.

One of these days, the world will run out of ways to mildly troll me, and then I will finally find peace in my life.

On my drive back home to Las Vegas, I ended up sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the middle of nowhere in the California desert, because it’s California and why not.

At least the view was nice.

The day after I got back home, Tempo‘s CEO reynad came to visit Las Vegas for some business meetings. He was staying at the Cosmopolitan and got pretty lucky with a 45th floor hotel room, so I snapped some photos while I was there to meet up with him.

I always say that the best part of traveling is coming back home, and I still believe that… unless your home is about to catch on fire, that is. Of course, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but apparently the Las Vegas Valley was having a bit of a tough time after I got back, first having some massive dust storms coming in from the north, then a massive fire starting in Mount Charleston, later named the Mahogany Fire.