"The Gernsback Continuum" is as old now as the stories it deconstructed were when it was new

We flew across the country due to the pandemic, but not to avoid the virus.

T. has fairly good time off by American standards, and mine is probably around average, but "fairly good" and "average" is nowhere near enough to do our jobs indefinitely while parenting. So we stayed with T.'s parents, who could take care of the kid while we worked. We incurred the expense of plane tickets and ran the risk of going in airports and on planes and flying through hotspots - four of them, because direct flights were cancelled on relatively short notice - and endangered the family we were visiting because it seemed preferable to quitting our jobs or parenting and working at the same time.

(There were other options, and maybe we should have considered them harder. We could have looked into some kind of nanny and we still are looking into that going forward. We could be more generous to ourselves with taking time off. We'd max out what we have long before COVID-19 conditions improve, but a day here and there is great. Using it as we need it vs. saving it until we really, really need it is famine logic applied to time.)

We were able to do this and didn't need to take any vacation time. Our jobs both were office jobs until March and working totally remotely had little or no impact on our productivity. The time zone change was a minor problem.

We're considering our options for the coming school year. One of them is going back to California. It may still turn out to be the right option but it's hard for me. It's an alien environment. The hills are brown, rolling but treeless. A neon sign on the way to the airport proclaims "Shasta: A Nationwide Beverage Company". I've never heard of it. A 1962 Impala convertible passed us. In DC I rarely see convertibles, I assume because drivers can't enjoy the open top on city streets. In Vermont you never see old cars because the roads are hard on them.

Its round lights and smooth lines looked like the Jetsons, the 1950s vision of the future. We're living in the future now, when flying across the country during a pandemic to save paid time off seems reasonable.