This Travel Blogger Found a Silver Lining to Travel Bans

If there’s one thing this pandemic has taught us is that life is fickle and fleeting. Once considered elementary, travelling has become a luxury. Take it from yogi, foodie, and adventurer, Alice Yeh.

An up and coming travel blogger, Yeh is known online by her moniker, Alice in Wandererland. With buzzing Instagram pages and a travel blog, Yeh documents the day to day of a travel blogger. Born in the suburbs of Philadelphia to Taiwanese immigrant parents, Yeh draws from her multicultural background.

Having visited more than 50 countries so far, she acknowledges how lucky she’s been so far. “Living abroad made it easy to visit neighboring countries,” she explains on her blog. “As a result, I have visited 50+ countries so far and still counting!”

But with Covid-19, she recently had to slow things down. “Even though our lives and plans have been upended, there are still silver linings,” she recently wrote on Instagram. “We just have to change our mindset and look for them!”

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✈️ So I did a thing… I actually flew over the long 4th of July holiday weekend! That's right… I took a flight during the pandemic!⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 😬 Emphasis on during not post-pandemic because post implies something is over. And let’s be real here. COVID-19 is far from over, especially in the US.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🤪 After quarantining at home for 4 months, I really needed to scratch my travel itch. Stir crazy would be an understatement. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🤷‍♀️ It seemed like everyone I knew was getting out of town for the long weekend. I know I’m not the only one who was feeling the need to escape the house (or tiny apartment in my case) and decided “F*** it.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🌵 After evaluating all the options and trying to figure out where to go last-minute, the boyfriend and I decided to jet down to Joshua Tree.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ✈️ Instead of driving 8 hours from San Francisco (and considering we’d have to drive back), we booked a flight from SFO to LAX 6 days before departure. We took a lot of things into consideration and decided to take the risk for a short haul flight (~1 hour).⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 😳 So what was it like? A few things were the same and a few were quite different.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 😷 I have never in my life seen SFO and LAX so empty with no security lines. As expected, everything was closed. Masks were required. People mostly followed social distancing.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 💻 For more details on my flight experience, read my blog post (link in bio). ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🤔 I’m not recommending flying or traveling. That’s a personal decision to make. We all need to do our own research and assess our own health, activity, and risk levels. Everyone will have different levels of risk tolerance.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🔎 Do research on your destination and their rules. You may be traveling to/from a place that’s less/more restrictive and has a higher/lower number of cases. Consult a doctor if you need to.

A post shared by Alice Yeh 🌎 Travel Experiences (@aliceinwandererland) on

“SO at the beginning of the year, I had grand plans to either throw a big birthday bash and party it up with friends. OR go to Mexico for a long weekend getaway… Of course, neither of those happened. Plans gotta change!” she further explained. Instead, she scoured Google Maps to find someplace local in California and decided to hit the road and visit Mammoth Lakes.

Follow her adventures online: