Travel During a Pandemic: Naples, Fl

Back in October, Ally and I, along with the boys and another couple who we love, headed to my parent’s house in Naples, Florida (saved to a highlight on Insta Stories). Up until this point, neither of us had traveled much since March… we were itching for a trip but also felt weary and nervous about traveling during such an uncertain time. When we were considering a trip, and craving a beach, we thought that it would be a super safe option to head to Naples, Fl. I wanted to take a blog post to share the steps that we took to stay safe, while still allowing ourselves to travel. I want to note that we are in no way promoting travel or suggesting that you travel if you do not feel safe… but if you’re like us and are absolutely dying for a trip, we think that there are ways that travel can be done safely right now!

TRAVELING BY PLANE: By now, you’ve probably seen our Colorado Ski trip that we took in December, 2020. On that trip re-cap, we raved about how much we LOVED United and felt so so safe on the plane. We pretty much always fly United (we are loyal customers) and this trip was no different. United is super strict about their mask policy and I have never seen airplane seats that are SO CLEAN. We wore our masks in the airport, kept them on for the entire flight and while we ubered to the house. When we got there, we finally de-masked and ya’ll… that is a feeling better than whipping off your bra at the end of the day 😉

A few tips that we have for staying safe in the airport/planes: 

• Bring hand sani… ALL THE HAND SANI. We use this FREQUENTLY. Anytime we touched a surface, sat on a chair, touched our phones, touched our faces… we are crazy about this (as our husbands’ can likely attest).
• Bring clorox wipes and use them as much as you feel that you need. Before the trip, I put clorox wipes into a baggie for each person, we used them to further wipe down our seats on the plane, to wipe down our phones after using them, and to wipe down our suitcases when we got to the house.
• K95 Masks: I bought these masks off of Amazon. They come in a 10 pack and we double-layered the K95 underneath our regular cloth masks – it is surprisingly not as uncomfortable as you might expect. We wore our masks for the entire time, before we got into the airport we put our masks on, and we did not take them off until we arrived at the house. We then threw away the K95 masks and washed our cloth ones.

A few tips that we have for minimizing contact: 

Rent a Car: we would typically rent a car when we travel now… but since my parent’s have cars at their house, it made more sense for us to just take an Uber from the hotel to the house* We kept our masks on for the entire time and sanitized frequently for the 25 minute Uber journey.

The Uber was about the only contact that we had with anyone for the entire trip, most of the rest of the time was spent poolside at the house, or oceanside by the beach. Beaches in Florida (probably, just like anywhere) really want to stay open, so the Private Beach Clubs are really strict about their social distancing policies, which we absolutely loved.

Stay in an airbnb or vrbo:

Right now, although we are travel junkies, we try to be as safe as possible when we are traveling and we have been avoiding hotels (although, I am not against hotels and have had lots of friends travel and stay in hotels and have felt perfectly safe – I think it is just a question of doing the research on hotel policies beforehand). My parents have a house in Florida, so we were fortunate enough to be able to stay there, otherwise we would have rented a beachside airbnb.

Minimize eating out where you see fit:

We didn’t eat out at all, we grilled at the house, had appetizers and cute little nibbles from Whole Foods, or made Italian food every night. If you plan your meals ahead of time, you can limit the amount of times you need to go to the grocery store.

We really enjoyed our short little weekend in Naples. It was exactly the break we needed and we felt super safe doing it. We went into the weekend knowing that it was just about quality time with our friends and chilling by the pool and we had the best time! 

• 

• 

Have you been traveling lately? Where have you been and how did you feel while you were there? We would love to hear!

Happy Travels,

Abi