Today marks 119 days of isolation since we stopped commuting into the city to work, started working from home and began the fight to avoid getting (and dying from) covid-19. We go to the grocery store once every three weeks, we make a few curbside pick-ups once a week and we walk the dog in our neighborhood. Other than that we work, eat and play at home and have things delivered in order to stay safe. We’re introverts, so it is weird, but not terrible.

But for some reason over the last couple of weeks, I have gotten terribly antsy about wanting to take the T@B out and trying some “for real” camping. Some of it is that as we inch closer to August and that two-week vacation that was supposed to be at Acadia in Maine, I’m realizing that just isn’t going to happen. As the disease spreads across the country, it doesn’t make any sense to cross state lines to vacation and the whole purpose of going to Acadia was to explore, which is not what we want from vacation this year. Maine will be there next year and hopefully we’ll be well and alive and will visit again. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what we might do instead.

What has seemed for a while like a good alternative is to camp at one of the DEC campgrounds closer to home. Ideally somewhere in the ADK or the Catskills, where we could spend several days off the grid and just basically stay on the campsite or possibly explore a nearby trail for a hike or kayak somewhere remote. Our goal is to get out, but really limit any kind of exposure to other people. We’ll have spent 5 months basically in a bubble at that point and we don’t want to compromise that safety. But most of those campgrounds have just opened in the last couple of days and so far are only honoring pre-existing reservations.

So every morning I stalk ReserveAmerica, looking to see what has changed or if there is any chance a reservation might be available somewhere. I look at state campground sites to see if there is some possibility to find a safe and remote site somewhere that isn’t so crowded. I read reviews and speculate about how things might change (good and bad) over the next month. And like everything else this year, figuring out what to do is going to be a balancing act of planning/overplanning/adjusting/flexing and playing it by ear.

In the meantime, we’re camping in our own frontyard and driveway this weekend and that is pretty awesome.