Being a Travel Blogger in a Year Without Travel

August 29, 2020 Logan T. Hansen

Do you want to hear the understatement of the century? 2020 has been one weird year. There we were at the start of a brand new decade on January 1st, looking ahead to a year in which practically every major holiday fell on a weekend, the economy was continuing the upward trend that started back at the beginning of Obama’s first term, and the puns concerning 20/20 vision hadn’t even gone stale yet.

Of course, fast forward a couple months and basically the entire world came to a screeching halt due to a global pandemic that’s now infected millions and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands — not to mention the jobs of many Americans. Industries across the spectrum have been negatively impacted by COVID-19, and that includes the travel industry, which is projected to suffer $505 billion in losses through the end of the year.

While I don’t work in the travel industry, and thus haven’t been directly affected by the losses already sustained and those yet to come, I do write about travel for fun right here on All Things Wanderful. If you look over the last few months at the posts that have been published on this site, however, you may have noticed that my content has been slightly sparse this year as compared to years past.

Throughout 2018 and (most of) 2019, four or five posts a month was my standard; if I didn’t hit that number in a 28-31 day span, something had to have gone horribly wrong. But in 2020 I’ve been posting much more sporadically, and oftentimes only one, two, or three times each month. There are a handful of reasons that is the case, but one of them is the simple fact that I haven’t had the opportunity to travel much of anywhere this year.

The last “big” trip I took was to Los Angeles in September/October 2019. The last time I was on an airplane altogether was on Dec. 30th. Since then, I’ve had to scuttle two trips — a casino bus tour up to the U.P. in April and a four-day trip down to Key West in July — and the only reason I’ve been out of state recently is because I’m in the middle of a move to Chicago.

So what does all of that equal? I’ll tell you: not much in terms of inspiration for this blog. When you’re not traveling at all, and don’t really have any plans to do so until at least next year, coming up with content can feel a lot like scraping the bottom of the idea barrel. Combine that with the other things I have had going on this year (job hunting, moving to a new state, finishing a novel), and it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise that 2020 has proven barren in the way of posts.

But even as life gets busy and travel remains a non-starter, I still plan on doing what I can when I have the time. For now, let me leave you with a few wanderful things worth revisiting that don’t require going anywhere:

-LTH