Diary of a Frustrated World Nontraveler - Part Two

Six years ago I published an essay on this blog about how my efforts to travel to Europe have consistently been stymied.  Now, in 2020, I'm on the verge of throwing up my hands, crying uncle, and tossing out my never-used passport.

I had planned to go to Paris last year at the invitation of a friend who lives there, but a sudden medical emergency - I won't get into the details - prevented me from going, along with my sudden loss of two jobs.  At the beginning of 2020, I had no definite plans to go this year. Though I left it open, I wasn't planning to make such a trip, and I was looking toward 2021 or 2022.

Then COVID-19 changed everything, including my travel plans, such as they were.  I got laid off from a job specifically because of COVID-19 - though I still have the job  I started earlier this year - and while I am tentatively hoping to go in 2023, when the pandemic should be over, the operative words are "should be."  We don't know when COVID-19 is going to devolve into a nuisance coronavirus like the previous four coronaviruses that were already circulating in the human population, and we don't know when things will return to a period when we don't have to wear "face coverings" and keep six feet apart from each other.   Having to do both in London or Paris is not the way I wanted to experience a European city.

Even worse is that not only do I have no money to travel, I don't even have money to do a lot of the small things I enjoyed doing before the pandemic.  Even taking care of mundane necessities like getting my car washed is too much for me.  There's a car wash in my town the does cheap, quick washes for six dollars.  I can't even afford that now.  I'm down to freelancing now, and I have to watch every cent I make.  In fact, apart from the most basic necessities, I have to avoid spending any cent I make.

No time would be better to leave the country, of course, than now, not just because of COVID-19 but because of the civil unrest over the George Floyd killing.  Those two things, plus the guy living in the White House, have me so depressed and so prone to being set off when the slightest thing goes wrong - and I've had things go wrong that are far more than slight - that I can't even think of traveling to the next state now, never mind the next country.     

I don't want to say never, and I'm not closing the door on it completely, but, at this point, I don't see myself traveling abroad any time soon.  I may have to concede that my opportunity to do so has passed.  For those of my fellow Americans who hoped to go abroad for the first time before COVID-19 took over '20, we'd best set about making American cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington as spiritually gratifying as London, Paris and Rome and making America as vibrant and purposeful as Britain, France, Italy or Austria.  We want to experience countries like that, but we can't.  We'd better start making America a country we want to live in, not a country we want to leave to see the sort of places other people are content to live in.