2021 Wrap-up: Oh, the Places I Went

[canyonwalker]

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. I thought I would get to this a few days ago but there was too much of a blogging backlog (as is usual when I travel) from our Hawaii trip. So I'll start it here with this blog about travel statistics, aka "Oh, the places I went", for 2021.

Here are Five Things:

1. Coronavirus remained the big story in 2021. It kept me home for 3 months early in the year, Even after we got vaccinated in March-April it remained a concern hanging over our heads, a constant "Should we or shouldn't we?" question about travel. Then came the Delta surge, casting more of a pall over late year travel, though getting boosters in October shored up our confidence enough to travel over Thanksgiving— though we tried to avoid areas where people went unmasked. Then the virus came back with a vengeance in late December with the winter/Omicron surge, causing us to cancel a planned New Year's Eve trip just hours before we would have left. For much of the year it felt less like, "Oh, the places you'll go!" and more like, "Oh, the places you won't go!"


2. I flew 21,000 miles in 2021. I track this via flightmemory.com, where you can input your flights and it computes the distance via Great Circle routes. (Technically the actual distance I flew with my butt in a seat is greater, as flight plans deviate from Great Circle routes to take advantage of winds and avoid bad weather, but this is the statistic I go with because it's easy.) Except for 2020, when I flew just 11,000 miles due to the pandemic deterring me from flying most of the year, this year's 21k miles is the fewest I've flown since... 2003.


3. I traveled outside my home area 50 days and 46 nights in 2021. As with flight miles this is up from 2020, when I logged 32 days and 27 nights away from home, but it's lower than any other year going back to about 2004. One interesting thing about 2021 is that my travel was all leisure travel; I had 0% work travel. Credit the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic/endemic for that. Even in 2020 I had two work trips early in the year, before Coronavirus precautions started shutting things at the end of February.


4. New states visited, new countries visited: 0. In 2021 I held fast at having visited 49/51 of the United States and the District of Columbia. I visited no new countries. Visiting all the states is one of my bucket list items. The two states I'm missing are Alaska and Mississippi. Hawk and I are discussing whether to visit Alaska next year or in 2023. As for Mississippi... well "the armpit of America" may be the last crossed off the list.


5. New national parks visited: +1, -1. Wait, what, minus one? Yes, this year I went from having visited 50/62 US national parks— another of my bucket lists is to visit all the national parks— to having visited 51/63. Visiting #51, Acadia National Park in June, was the step forward. The step back came when an Act of Congress created a new national park, the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. Technically the legislation passed in late December 2020 as part of the massive $1.4T omnibus spending bill with $900B of Covid-19 relief, but even the Park Service didn't publish a press release until late January.

More 2021 retrospectives to come.