Log in Subscribe

Smallwood-Mongaup Valley

March 18, 2022

James Loney
Posted 3/18/22

Digital Travel in a Plague Year

Potentially important advice for would-be travelers prepping for first-time travel after Covid: ask lots of questions as you develop and execute your plans. Even …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Smallwood-Mongaup Valley

March 18, 2022

Posted

Digital Travel in a Plague Year

Potentially important advice for would-be travelers prepping for first-time travel after Covid: ask lots of questions as you develop and execute your plans. Even experienced travelers will sometimes find their ‘this is the wonted way we travel along’ is now ‘OMG everything’s changed!’ I speak from experience …

The long, hard, and bitter winter of 2021-22 has been exhausting. One might think, with the omicron variant subsiding and each day longer than the last by several minutes, optimism would be in the air. Far from it. Maybe it has been the weekly ice storms, or frozen water pipes, or maybe Vladimir Putin’s pestiferous death machine rolling across Ukraine toward the border with NATO. Maybe all of it. It’s been harsh and bitter, and while I normally love the white winters up here, I am sick of it this year.

Time for a break. I decided to travel south to Savannah, GA to meet up with long-unseen friends-and-kin. First leg of the journey to LaGuardia was accomplished with Shortline Bus, now resuming Monticello service. Bus Traveler! Be careful. Service is spotty (departures to NYC only at 8:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 6:00 PM, 6:30 PM). If trying to leave on either of the last two busses, know this: the whole station closes promptly at 5:30 PM. You will have to pay the driver in cash or buy an online ticket using your mobile while standing in line awaiting the bus if you arrive after 5:30 PM.

If you have neither cash nor phone and credit card handy, you won’t be traveling on Shortline anywhere for about eighteen hours. Shortline Monticello really needs better signage about this important matter; several customers (aka Yours Truly) arrived at the station ‘late’ and went promptly wild when they realized the ticket window and station were already dark. Once purchased digitally, the QR code on your phone is quickly scanned by the driver and you’re on your way!

On the plane down to Savannah (where I sit sipping lime-orange lemonade in flimsy clothing writing this), I started in on a book I have been meaning to get to for some time, NYC and Sullivan-County writer Barry Joseph’s very moving “Friday is Tomorrow Or The Dayenu Year” (FridayisTomorrow. com). Joseph’s book is a kind of modern-day “Journal of the Plague Year,” an early, post-pandemic attempt by an engaged family-man and VP of Digital to parse out the implications of Covid.

The book begins very movingly with a riveting recollection of the Covid-induced death of Joseph’s beloved father and the funeral and shiva period Joseph arranges over FB and Zoom. The book then proceeds to describe the development of new forms of human communication and community that the pandemic has already spawned. Admittedly, we are still early on in the ‘post-pandemic’ period. We may not even have passed through all of it, yet.

But the book (available on Amazon) is compulsively readable and will generate a lot of questions and answers about where we have come from in the past two years, and where we are going. Get it and start planning to travel!

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here