Advisories Continue to Interrupt World Travel Plans

TEXAS — Imagine seeing the effects of the coronavirus before the outbreak took hold in the United States.

That’s exactly what happened to one Texan who saw the very beginning of the pandemic while on a trip to Spain.

“Spain has always been on my bucket list,” said traveler Caroline Schaffer.

Schaffer was able to check Spain off her bucket list, and while she got the pictures, the trip wasn’t exactly how she pictured it.

“Our first leg was in Barcelona and that was like, for about five to six days. It was business as usual. When we were there, we started to get a lot of news reports. I have an Apple Watch and I would get like, buzzed all the time with new outbreaks here, here and here,” she said.

And that’s when she began to worry. When she first landed in Spain, there were only about a dozen confirmed cases.

“I’m known for being overly precautious, so of course I came with a mask and gloves while traveling just to make sure I was safe if anything was to happen. Obviously that’s an illusion of safety but you know, it’s something,” Schaffer said.

But then she started getting alerts about what was happening in Italy.

“It went from Northern Italy being on lockdown to entire Italy being on lockdown to us hearing in Austin that they’re canceling South by Southwest, and I knew that it was starting to happen, like I could feel it in my gut,” she said.  

She decided to cut her trip short and flew back to Austin with a bunch of other passengers also on edge.

“We heard people coughing on the plane, and of course that kind of freaked us out so we whipped out our masks and I know that sounds funny but it’s really not,” she said.

When she got home, she self-quarantined and braced for a similar outbreak here but realized a lot of her friends and family weren’t taking the threat as seriously.

“I think the majority of people I would talk to [were] kind of in denial about the magnitude of the situation and almost in denial that – it’s so far away, how could that happen here?” Schaffer said.

And even though it is now happening here, Schaffer is thankful to be home and safe. She’s hunkering down like many of us until we’re all able to once again check more trips off our bucket lists.

While Schaffer managed to get to her destination, many international trips have been canceled. That includes the honeymoon of a Central Texas couple.

Tori Valdez and her husband booked their flights, hotels and tours to explore Egypt and Israel next month, but travel restrictions and advisories are currently making those plans impossible.

“We were super excited about it. But we quickly learned that if we – we were supposed to leave three weeks from now and we quickly learned that that wasn’t going to happen,” Valdez said. “We started reading things that said if you travel to Israel that you’ll have to be in quarantine for a couple weeks going into the country, so that’s definitely not the way we wanted to spend our honeymoon.”

To be safe, the couple is rebooking their honeymoon for the end of the year. While Valdez is bummed about her honeymoon, she says she’s more concerned about her mother and sister, both of whom are nurses and are working on the front line of the pandemic..