We were still living in Boston a few blocks from Fenway Park when the Coronavirus outbreak began. We’d moved to Boston in 2018 when we came back from living in Europe and attended over half the Red Sox regular season home and all but one of the post-season games in 2018. Good times.

Having tired of Boston’s high rents and a shoebox-size apartment, we were scheduled to move to Plymouth in early January 2020. However, the building where we were moving was new construction and our move-in had been delayed, so we waited in the city and watched the virus begin to spread in China.

We finally moved to Plymouth in early February and spent the month settling in and exploring Plymouth’s plentiful restaurants and charming downtown. Our apartment is next to the train station, so Boston is just a little over an hour away.

Travel plans for the first half of 2020

On Valentine’s Day, I received an email that my 50,000 American Airlines miles were expiring in July, so we decided to book a trip to Portugal in May to use them. We discussed the virus at the time we booked but thought the virus would most likely die out like the flu tends to do each spring, so we thought May would probably be fine. Just in case, we bought travel insurance for both the flight and the hotel.

That same day, Amtrak had a Valentine’s Day sale, so we also bought Acela tickets to Baltimore and some Red Sox tickets for the last week of March, where we’d meet our son for a couple of Red Sox games. He lives in Denver and we typically meet in different places around the world each year.

We also had a week of Red Sox spring training on the calendar for the first of March. At that time in the U.S., the Coronavirus was primarily in Seattle and the cruise ships, so we decided to go ahead and go. We spent the week in a hot, humid, and crowded Fort Myers, taking time to enjoy some time on the water as well as attending a few games at Fenway South.

We arrived home in a crazy windstorm the night of the 6th of March. That weekend, we received a grocery delivery, purchased a couple of items in the Plymouth Rotary auction, and went to our favorite restaurant, Three V.

By Monday, things began to accelerate. By Thursday, we’d entered into self-imposed isolation.

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