coronavirus road trip best practices

Post date: 2020-07-09 09:22:10

A family member suggested a road trip over Labor Day weekend. I'm trying to determine feasibility and wondering if there are things I'm not thinking about.

I live in New Hampshire with my wife and kids. My mom and sister live in Ohio. They usually fly up to visit a couple of times a year, but that's not happening this year for obvious reasons. But my mom asked about potentially driving to meet somewhere in between, which would be in the Finger Lakes region. I'm trying to decide if this would be a good idea or not.

Neither group is in a particularly hard-hit area. Cases are falling in our part of New Hampshire, and their part of Ohio is small enough that there were never very many cases to begin with. That said, we're both taking precautions. We all work from home. Although we've gone out slightly more since reopening, we're primarily going out for grocery shopping and other essential errands, and we always wear masks the entire time we're out. Our kids are in daycare, but the daycare is taking precautions as well: staff wear masks, no adults are allowed in the building, and anyone entering (even the infants) get their temperatures taken.

We would be renting a whole-house Airbnb. It seems like there's a pretty good selection of no-contact Airbnbs in the region, so aside from a grocery trip, we wouldn't have to really interact with anyone at the destination (and we'd even be bringing a lot of food with us, so maybe we wouldn't need the grocery trip).

My mom owns a commercial cleaning side business, so she has access to disinfectants and would be willing to wipe down surfaces in the house before anyone else went in, as well as cleaning up after we leave.

When driving west, we generally avoid the Mass Pike anyway and take Route 2 through Massachusetts. My mom and sister would take 71 around Cleveland and hit the Thruway in Buffalo. We could use drive-thus or bring food to eat, so we wouldn't have to go inside anywhere to eat. The only reason that I could see we'd need to get out of the car is to use the bathroom. As it happens, we have a training potty from when our daughter was potty-training that we keep in the car already for things like hiking, where there's not always a bathroom at a trailhead. We could use that so as to avoid going into public restrooms. (Our son is still in diapers.) My mom and sister would still need to use public restrooms on the drive, but it seems to me that, as long as they're using a single-toilet gas station bathroom and not one of the massive Thruway rest stop ones, that the risk would be fairly low.

The idea, once we arrive, is to basically stay at the house. We'd be looking for something with a lot of amenities - lake access, walking paths, a yard for activities - so that we could entertain ourselves and not depend on going anywhere.

When I say all that, it seems like we've got a pretty low risk of either bringing the virus with us or catching it while we're there. But I feel like there are things I'm not taking into account. Unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. So I figure the best thing to do is to get as much input as possible; hence, you guys. What am I missing? Is there something we could do to minimize our exposure even more?

Note that this is early in the planning stages. Nothing has been booked and everyone is willing to walk away if we can't keep things safe.

Please click Here to read the full story.