Tuesday night I was in the DC suburbs for reasons I’ll talk about at another time, and at one point I found myself sitting on the tiny balcony outside my hotel room, eating Korean take-out, drinking beer out of the water glasses that came in the room, and watching streaming video on my Chromebook, which was propped up on top of the ice bucket holding the can with the half-a-beer that wouldn’t fit in the glass. It struck me that, last year at this time, this would’ve been an establishing shot used in a prestige TV show to illustrate how pathetic my character was, but under the current circumstances this very well may have counted as living my best life.

I went back and forth a bunch about whether to make this trip or not (and another round of back-and-forth about whether to talk about having done it), but ultimately decided it was worth the risk, which was pretty minimal. There were probably ten times during the whole three-day trip when I was within 20 feet of another person with neither of us wearing a mask, and eight of those were outdoors.

In normal circumstances, this trip would’ve involved a flight from Albany probably to BWI, but we’re a good long way from me being willing to get on a plane, so I drove down. The drive, segments of which I’ve done A LOT over the years, featured probably the lightest traffic I have ever seen on the New Jersey Turnpike during daylight hours. It was a refreshing glimpse of normality, though, to see that the Outer Loop of the DC Beltway still managed to produce backed-up traffic at the Mormon Temple as I was leaving Wednesday morning. Way to go, DC.

I normally really enjoy travel, but this was kind of freaky. Lots of businesses are still closed (including most of the food service at rest areas on the various major roads), and what’s open was pretty empty. The hotel I was in was an absolute Overlook-Hotel-style ghost town: I interacted briefly with the desk clerk at check-in and check-out, and otherwise never laid eyes on another human. I left the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, but I’m not sure they would’ve had housekeeping clean the room until after I checked out, anyway. (I left them double the tip I usually would’ve.)

I brought beer and breakfast food from home, and got take-out for the two other meals I had in the DC area. One of those, I ate in a park, the other was the aforementioned balcony dinner (for the record, the Korean food was pretty good). I ended up binge-watching WATCHMEN on streaming video because my usual go-to activity during hotel stays is to watch random sporting events, preferably in a bar, but there are no live sports and I wouldn’t’ve been willing to sit in a random bar even if one were open. The two meals I had on the road were drive-thru fast food (I actually got off the Thruway to get mediocre chain drive-thru because there was no way I was standing in line to get Roy Rogers…).

So, you know, not the most pleasant trip, but not completely horrible. Just… weird. Not remotely a normal travel experience, and little sign that people are rushing back out to “re-open the economy,” at least in the handful of mid-Atlantic states I passed through.

Any discussion of going outside these days has to meet a compulsory “Judging the behavior of strangers” component, so I’ll say that where I was, mask-wearing was pretty much universal. It helps that all the businesses I went to had signs up saying masks were required by law. I tend to think these assessments are mostly a glass-half-full sort of thing, though, telling you more about the person doing the judging than anything else. When I say it was pretty much universal, I mean I didn’t see anybody pointedly not wearing a mask indoors in public spaces. There were lots of maskless people walking in parks, or putting on/taking off masks right outside the doors of businesses, but neither of those particularly bother me. In fact, I’m moderately certain I was the “OMG, that guy doesn’t have a mask on!” for somebody else in one of those parks or parking lots.

Anyway, it was a weird experience, and not one I’m in a huge hurry to repeat. I was actually worried before I left that it would feel more risky than it did in the moment. The little contact I had with people was very limited, and everybody involved was acting responsibly. The specific reason for this trip isn’t going to recur for a good while, but if I had a need to make another overnight trip in the general Northeast/ Mid-Atlantic region in the next week or two, I don’t think I’d be all that concerned. Past that, it’s harder to say, because every forecast these days has an implicit two-week horizon.