Travel - Then vs Now

I'm fortunate enough to be fully vaccinated, so a couple weeks ago I took my first plane flight in over a year. For most of the prior 15 years or so I've flown around 50 to 100,000 miles a year, so a moderate flyer (given 100,000 miles flown is around 200 hours in the air, or over a solid week, it's still pretty significant). I went and visited friends in the NE of the US, and damn do I miss socializing and just hanging out with people. Airports and planes are as awful as you remember, but they get you to places and people that are worth it all. Before I left, I looked at my phone for a map of where I'd been in the previous 6 months:

You might be able to spot where I go vaccinated. King County, WA, where I live, you couldn't find an appointment for love nor money - but drive out a couple hours to rural eastern WA and you had your pick that day. It's also a really scenic drive. And here is the equivalent time period two years prior:

I think my personal carbon footprint was a little larger in 2018 than 2020. Despite the pain of flying, I'm still looking forward to getting out there again, and as soon as the UK drops the test/quarantine on arrival, I'll be heading back there. Since I moved to the US I'd been back in the UK once or twice a year and saw family, 2020 was the first year I hadn't and so it'll likely be a 2 year gap. Fortunately, despite being a basket case in most other regards, the UK did a great job with vaccinations (thank you NHS, yay socialized healthcare), and my mother got her first vaccine in mid January, which for those of you with elderly relatives will know the relief. 

For those in the US who wonder about the value of a good single healthcare system, the NHS in the UK prioritized similarly (primarily age) but literally called up each person and sent letters saying "It's your turn in 2 weeks, here's your appointment" and proceeded that way. The UK also took the route of making the gap between the two shots up to 12 weeks, not the 3/4 in the US, to maximise the number of people with one shot. From people I know the gap seems closer to 9 weeks in practice.

For those in the UK wondering the US in comparison (in the way back of a few weeks ago when there were more supply restrictions) you were pretty much on your own - vaccines were spread between some pharmacies, some hospital vaccination sites, some mass vaccination sites, and you needed an appointment, which was all done through a mish-mash of systems and you needed to be somewhat tech savvy, have time on your hands, and be willing to move quickly which basically was the exact opposite of what many key groups such as the elderly or front line workers with multiple jobs had. And everyone seems to know someone who skipped the line because they knew someone who knew someone, or worked for the right company (I knew work-from-home accountants at Amazon, with no morbidities, who got it in February because... well they were Amazon. And I knew people with health issues who had to wait.), or if you loitered around pharmacies at closing time and got leftover doses. Now in the US we've reached the point where any adult can get it via walkin - amazing the effect of competency at the top - there are more doses than willing people, thank you anti-vaxxers for making it harder.

Maybe I'll post my equivalent travel again in a year. I hope it's closer to that second picture than the first, because that means our world has returned at least somewhat back to what it was before.