Traveling from Mexico to the US and Back During COVID-19

It has been a strange few months since my last blog post.  Approximately 10 days of rain at the start of June made my studio apartment in Merida seem more like a swamp than a living space and after my apartment flooded AND my kitchen fell off the wall, I finally decided enough was enough and decided to go back to Ohio for a mental health break.

Now traveling to Ohio for a mental health break is certainly not something that I would ever think I would say but desperate times call for desperate measures.  After 3 months of being alone 99% of the time, I couldn’t handle it anymore.   So I booked a bus ticket to Cancun and then a flight from Cancun to Akron and less than a week later, I was on my way

Going to Ohio was interesting.  I haven’t lived in my hometown for almost 20 years and my trips back there have been few and far between.  COVID just made things a hell of a lot weirder.  To start, my mom wasn’t able to pick me up at the airport and my stepdad simply refused. Instead, I had a super cheery Uber driver take me the hour drive from the airport to the house I grew up in near Youngstown, Ohio.   While my step dad treated me like I had brought the plague, my mom tried to balance between the need to social distance and providing a welcoming environment.  While I didn’t have to quarantine, I did try and stay as far away from my mom and stepdad as I could and I always work a mask while I was in the house.

For the 2 days we were there, I spent a lot of time sitting outside in the gazebo that my dad had originally built and even did the 3 mile walk to the town center which I had never done in my entire life.  After 3 months of lockdown in a city made of stone and concrete, it was the first time I had touched grass or trees in what felt like a lifetime.  

• 

• 

After getting some things organized in Youngstown, we were soon on our way to Lakeside, Ohio where my mom has a summer home.  My stepdad had finally calmed down enough to let me ride in the car with them (I am terrified of driving) and within a few hours, we were in a different universe.  Lakeside is a resort community full of cute little wooden cottages, a Victorian hotel, coffee shop, pizzeria, old fashioned movie theater and lots of other fun activities to do.  Most importantly, it is right on Lake Erie with a beautiful lakefront path and a dock that is perfect for jumping off of.    I spent the next 3 ½ weeks living life like COVID didn’t exist.  I went to exercise classes by the lake, I ran along the lake path,  I took an embroidery class, I paddle boarded and swam every day.  I got to see people I have known for 20 years.   I ate more ice cream and donuts than any adult should and drank as many IPAs as I could before feeling like a pickle.  I even managed to sneak in a trip to the Detroit consulate to apply for Mexican residency. Celebratory margaritas followed!

• 

• 

In Lakeside, most people wore masks while indoors and the lake breeze whisked away any high concentrations of coronavirus that may have been exhaled, sneezed or spoken.  I was very rarely unmasked indoors with anyone besides my mom besides a quick dinner at the restaurant I had worked at for 7 years while I was in high school and college.  It felt like its own safe little utopia.

• 

• 

• 

Then on a trip to Wal Mart, reality snuck its way back into my mind.  On a quick trip out to get some much needed things to take back with me to Mexico, my mom and I were the only people wearing masks.  The aisles were full of obese families stocking up on junk food and NO ONE was wearing masks.  Seeing how nonchalant that appeared to be about their health, it was a fair assumption that the words social distancing hadn’t quite caught on in their vocabulary.  We got out of the shop as fast as possible.

Then reports of positive cases started coming in.  First, it was a bunch of cases linked with Put-in-Bay, one of the party spots of Lake Erie.  Then,  it was a 30-something year old man from the next town over.  Next,  it was a suspected case at one of the local restaurants (they were still waiting for the test results when I left).  Once I was back in Mexico, I heard of a confirmed case of one of the employees of the pizzeria that I went to right before I flew back to Merida.

Ohio to Mexico

My flight back was uneventful.  Cleveland to Miami to Merida……I was terrified of flying through Miami (which is currently one of the world hotspots of COVID outbreak) but I didn’t need to be.  The gates for my connecting flights were right next to each other so I didn’t have to walk through the airport at all and all of my fellow passengers were diligently wearing masks. I felt safer on the flight than I did walking around in Wal-Mart.

I got back to Merida and after having my temperature checked and filling in a contact tracing form (which was never actually collected), I was in an uber on my way to my new home.   Out of blind luck, I had made friends with an expat couple who had an empty guest house behind their main house that they wanted to rent out.  I happily moved into one of the bedrooms and now have a room that opens up to a gorgeous little pool AND an adorable dog and a sassy cat.  

• 

• 

While quarantining yourself for 14 days is something that I never really want to do again, it hasn’t been that bad.   I have spent my mornings teaching, my afternoons exercising, swimming and napping and my evenings binge watching Glee and The Babysitter’s Club and working on a puzzle while relentlessly listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. This whole time, there have been rumors that the governor of the Yucatan is going to call for stronger restrictions and I have spent many stressful hours despairing that by the time my quarantine was over that I would finally emerge into public life, everything would be shut again.  So far, that isn’t the case and I am eagerly waiting for a walk outside.  Fingers crossed that I will soon have more adventures to write about!