The Last Trips of Our Old Normal

Everyday, Erika walked down the hall of her dorm building, and the rooms got emptier and emptier. The loud laughs of a Friday night hangout quickly diminished to silence within days. Long gone was the excitement and energy that once radiated from the building at the beginning of the spring semester. More and more students from across the world were leaving their study abroad semester as COVID-19 began to ravage through the country.

Today, a trip across town to the grocery store is an all-day event with a lot of preparation and planning put into it. It is hard to believe that just over a month ago, American citizens were flying around the country and world, soaking up what everyone didn’t know would be the last few days of ordinary social interaction.

The United States administration’s first step in stopping the spread of COVID-19 was to limit travel. It all started with President Trump’s ban on travel to China. However, as the virus spread, so did the bands. But before the restrictions were put in place, Americans were left with a choice: to travel or not to travel.

This decision was very hard for Erika DeLong who was studying abroad in Florence, Italy as the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to take over the world.

Erika left for Florence on January 29th to live with five other students and experience a spring semester of a lifetime at Florence University of the Arts, but she was forced to come back to America early as Italy quickly became the hardest hit country outside of mainland China.

While there were whisperings of the severity of the virus at the beginning of 2020, Erika did not worry until a few weeks into the semester. “I remember hearing about the virus a few times,” said Erika. “But I wasn’t very worried at the beginning. The first time I was nervous that I may be affected was when NYU sent their Florence students home. The reality that I may be getting sent home hit harder once I heard that.”

As the first students started to pull out of the program, many more followed. Erika’s home university, Susquehanna University, requires all students to study abroad, so the university had many students studying abroad all over the world at the same time. Since the conditions were much worse in Italy, the university left it up to the students whether they wanted to leave or not, but the school strongly advised coming home. After some consideration with her friends and family, Erika decided to end her study abroad experience and come home.

“Even though the virus was hitting pretty hard in Italy, I felt safe when I was there. Many of the locals I spoke to reassured me that I would be safe. This put me at ease because they are locals, so they obviously knew what they were talking about.”

When Erika was in Florence, she traveled out of the country, and every time she came back to Italy, they took her temperature. That was not the case when she came back to the United States in early March. “When I landed in the U.S., I went through customs, collected my luggage, met my parents, and left the airport,” she said. “They did not take my temperature. There were no screenings and thankfully no quarantine. I was expecting more, especially since coming from Italy, but I was thankful to be able to go home.”

The virus continued to get closer and closer to America, but by the beginning of March, many Americans still did not feel direct effects of COVID-19 restrictions, so many people still decided to go through with their Spring Break plans.

McKenzie Miller, a Labor and Delivery Nurse at the Lehigh Valley Hospital Muhlenberg campus, embarked on a Royal Caribbean cruise with her boyfriend just days before America began coronavirus protections measures.

“Before I even left, I talked to my boss, and she said to go and that everything is fine,” said McKenzie. “The staff at the hospital wasn’t worried about [the virus] at all.” McKenzie boarded the ship on March 8th.

Before the cruised disembarked, Royal Caribbean offered full refunds to those who wished to cancel their trip, and they also refused passengers who were from, visited, or had contact with individuals from China, Italy, and Japan in the last fifteen days. McKenzie recalled that they took temperature screenings of the passengers before boarding, and they did a deep sanitation of the ship.

While she was on the cruise, McKenzie was cut off from society. “We had our phones turned off for most of trip because I am too cheap to pay for Wi-Fi,” she said. “But we did have a day in Orlando, so we were able to turn our phones on. We had six channels — Royal Caribbean Channel, ESPN, BBC News, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN — so when we were going to sleep, we watched the news and were getting really freaked out. The media was scaring us, especially when everything was getting canceled with NHL, NBA, etc.”

Despite the crazy circumstances, the atmosphere on the ship was still that of a fun and relaxing vacation. The staff made sure every aspect of the ship was cleaned and sanitized, and they ensured that the passengers were keeping clean with sanitizing stations all over the ship.

“We found out on day six that Royal Caribbean was stopping all cruises for 30 days after we docked,” said McKenzie. “It was really surreal. Especially then to log on to the internet and see people freaking out over stupid stuff like being stuck at home with their kids for two weeks when there are literately people who may be out of a job.”

Now, McKenzie is home and going back to the reality of working in a hospital where the idea of contracting COVID-19 is almost inevitable. “I am super anxious because of the way people are reacting and not the virus itself,” she said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I am going to get it at some point. Maybe I have it now. If the virus would have been this bad before I left, I never would have gone. Things got really bad mid-way through our trip, and we were stuck and couldn’t come back.”

Despite the chaos that ensued, McKenzie had a great time on her trip and is glad she was able to go experience it before the world shut down for a while. Now, she is fighting the circumstances and shortages at the hospital because women are going to keep laboring and delivering no matter what is going on in the world.

There were many Americans, though, who had to cancel their trips altogether. Cheryl Bleiler, high school English teacher at Brandywine Heights High School in Berks county, was the head chaperone for a ten-day European trip that 42 students were supposed to go on from March 13th to March 22nd. The trip was planned for 18 months, and it all fell apart within a couple of weeks.

The tour was called Central Europe and the Holocaust, booked through EF Educational Tours, and it included stops in Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, and Prague. The students would have visited various buildings and experiences, including cathedrals, castles, and an extensive tour of Auschwitz.

“I believe we first started considering possible rescheduling or altering the trip about the end of February, when the virus was starting to become an issue in Italy,” said Cheryl. As conditions got worse in Europe and the first cases occurred in the U.S., parents, chaperones, and the school board decided to postpone the trip. This happened weeks before Governor Wolf closed school indefinitely.

Cheryl is in talks with the booking company to try and reschedule another time for the trip to occur once the pandemic is under better control all over the world. Sadly, the graduating seniors will not be able to join the experience.

As Erika was leaving Florence, the streets were a little bare. Life was just starting to be put on hold. It was time to come home. For Erika, her trip was cut short, but she didn’t realize that the next few months of her life would be put on hold as well as the virus spread across the world. Erika is now at home in Pennsylvania with her family, safe and surviving the social distancing, remembering her crazy study abroad experience that she will most likely bring up at every dinner party for the rest of her life. She knows that makes her more fortunate than the many victims in Italy, the United States and around the world.

Originally posted on Medium