NYC, here we come. maybe.

Maybe.

The plan for months has been an East Coast trip for Spring Break 2020. Flying into DC and spending a three day weekend there, heading to New York for four days, and then a quick day in Boston before flying home. My Pinterest board is covered with travel ideas. The dining room table is covered with travel books from the library and lists of my notes. The suitcases are spread out in a line in the living room just waiting to be packed.

I keep watching the news about the Coronavirus and hoping and praying that this pandemic does not mean we need to cancel this trip. I'm mostly still confident about going, I think, (Can't you hear my confidence?), but comments from others make me worry that we are being irresponsible if we proceed as planned. Some coworkers at preschool today seemed surprised to hear that we had not cancelled. A mom friend who works in infectious disease decided to cancel her spring break plans, though she did say she cancelled mostly because she was traveling to visit elderly grandparents. She also said that choosing to travel right now means you have to accept the fact that you could potentially be quarantined there for fourteen days.

While I am definitely worried, I am not yet to the point where I feel definitively that we need to cancel. Ben and I have had many discussions about this and both think we'll just continue to keep an eye on things and do what feels right. We have options within the trip to change the amount of exposure we have to large crowds. Our rental house in the DC area is well outside the city, so we could choose to skip DC altogether. We originally planned to take the train from DC to NYC, but we now have a rental car. We may skip the day of Boston sightseeing and instead arrive there just in time to fly back to STL. We may decide to skip many of the stops we were hoping to make in NYC and spend out time wandering a bit more instead.  Or, we may decide that we shouldn't visit New York right now at all and just eat the cost of that rental home and choose to visit some smaller East Coast towns instead. (And man would we have some disappointed Hedenbergies if this had to happen!)  And then worst case would be us making the decision on Thursday that we should not make this trip at all.  (Well, actually, worst case would be getting the virus or being in quarantine in another city. But I don't want to go there with my worry yet.)

There is no getting away from the constant talk about Coronavirus. Since we have confirmed cases and people in quarantine in St. Louis, it's now being talked about more than ever. There is currently much more talk about Coronavirus in St. Louis than about today's primary election. The TV stations clearly want to hype up the our fear level as I'm sure it's helping their ratings.

So we wait in limbo to see where this is going to land us. This time next week I could be wandering around in New York City, I could be sitting here in my house, or I could be exploring a small East Coast city instead.

No matter where, I am sure I will still be alternating between feeling worried about things and feeling really tired of talking about it and hearing about it.