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Coronavirus COVID-19

COVID and wildfires gave us an education instead of a vacation. We'll never be the same.

We were looking forward to beautiful scenery and celebrating birthdays with our sons. But the delta variant and climate change had other plans for us.

Smoke from the Caldor Fire in California covers Lake Tahoe in the Incline, Nev., area on Aug. 24, 2021.

The last time we tried for a two-week vacation, in 1993, a Hurricane Emily evacuation forced us to leave after six days. Nearly three decades later, we decided to try again. We left early this time, too, after close encounters with COVID-19 and wildfires.

This is not a first-world rant against the inconvenience of climate change and a virus we can’t seem to beat. Rather, it’s a look at lessons learned and not learned – about the folly of betting against nature, science and, in particular, the frightening fires that seem remote on the East Coast but often dictate life in the West. It's about the friction between a husband and wife with different tolerances for masking, crowds and indoor vs. outdoor dining, as they traveled through a patchwork of pandemic regulations in three states.