A Travel Professional’s First Trip After a Year Without Flying
A little over a year ago, it would have been considered absurd for any professional in travel tech to not have taken a single flight over such a long time period. This year, the reverse is true: those who have flown for non-urgent circumstances since the start of the pandemic have at one point or another, been attacked or shamed.
In my recent article The Joy of Anticipation, I mentioned that I’ve been in Croatia over the past year. That’s the longest I’ve been in a single country since my teenage years. I spoke about how I have started to lose my sense of wonder (or actually — let’s just call it wanderlust for the delight of the CuddlyNest Content team). My long pause from travel reinvigorated me with a sense of anticipation for the next trip I would hopefully take.
I made it to India. How do I feel? Ecstatic. That anticipation that I had predicted for myself just last month did eventually manifest itself in the best way possible.
After a long trip from one home to another — Croatia to India — came the beautiful moment I had been playing over and over again in my mind: seeing my family after all this time, including my niece, who I watched grow via Whatsapp calls. Arriving to my home country after all the fear I had underwent during the pandemic was surreal. Not to mention that I had arrived just in time for Holi; I haven’t been in India for Holi in so long that I almost forget how the festival was celebrated.
That’s not the only forgetting I did. Every travel touchpoint I encountered was somehow… confusing, starting from Zagreb Airport. I actually had to pause and think twice about the whole flow from check-in to boarding. My layover in Frankfurt was mind-boggling — where do I go? My navigation was off. And landing in New Delhi was another story. I’ve flown to over 100 countries, but it just took one year without travel for me to be “reborn” into a travel rookie. I’m 18 again, and I’m loving it.
India isn’t my last stop. After returning to Croatia in a few weeks, I’ll start to close up and farewell the home I built there. Leaving saddens me, but I need to return to the nomadic state that I have worked so hard to achieve. In fact, I’m so optimistic about the upcoming state of the world that I’ve gone ahead and booked flights for my summer plans already. It’s time to move forward, with a continuous acknowledgment of all that has past.
