When I discovered the dreadful toll of the pandemic in Costa Rica, I realised there were worse things than holidaying at home
I’d been aware, for a while, that wealthy friends had resumed travelling, and a few months ago – in the first flush of vaccination optimism and with Covid rates in New York plunging – it looked easy. Perhaps we can do this, I thought. Countries reliant on tourism dollars were reopening. Airline prices were still low. It was, I told myself, safer to go to Costa Rica than to Florida. If JetBlue thought it was OK to travel to San José, then that was good enough for me. Besides which, I thought, with stubborn servility, if it really was dangerous to fly to Central America, the US government wouldn’t let me do it. (Ha.)
That was in late March. Last summer we had, along with everyone else lucky enough to be able to leave the city, rented a minivan and, after driving north for three hours – the minimum journey required to clear the extraordinary inflation-hitting resort rates near New York – sat out August in a house in Massachusetts. There was no question of flying to England or anywhere else, and if we missed seeing friends and family, there was some consolation in having that option removed. Of course, people still flew last summer. But their circumstances were generally so different from our own that it removed the pain of decision-making.
