Happy New Year: A Look Back at 2020

While most people look to forget 2020, there was still a lot of great experiences during a rather rough year.  2020 brought us the COVID-19 pandemic which crippled the nation by shutting down the country for months and never fully reopened without restrictions, a busy hurricane season which saw us deep into the Greek alphabet for storm named with areas of the country hit by multiple major storms and a presidential election that still hasn't been officially declared.   It was one that will always be remembered.

The crazy year really sidelined a lot of what was planned for the year.  We started the year out with a trip to St Augustine in March.  That was at the beginning of the pandemic but when strict restrictions began.  During the trip, Governor DeSantis began issuing orders that closed bars and restaurants and by the end of the trip all attractions were closed as emergency stay at home orders were issued.  These restrictions would remain in place in some fashion for the remainder of 2020.

As a result of the stay at home orders, all of the usual places we visit were closed.  There were no zoo trips, no theme park trips and in some cases not even any placed to nature walk while we waited for the COVID curve to flatten.  While the nation suffered with the disease and the economic impacts of the country being shut-down, it had fallouts personally for me outside of photography.  Watched my son's first year of high school baseball end early after a handful of games, work at home became a requirement and when I returned to work, it was a new environment filled with mask requirements, cancelled flights and lots of parked aircraft.  It was a new normal.

By May, things started to get back to normal a bit.  Restaurants began to open for take-out only, you were able to get back outside doing things in parks and nature preserves but theme parks and large groups attractions remained closed.  During this time, we hit a bunch of nature parks like Six Mile Cypress and toured a bunch of small towns by car.

By summer more openings were allowed.  Youth sports started back up and my son's travel baseball team resumed play.  Restaurants were allowed to begin indoor seating at partial capacity.  Theme parks, zoos and other attractions began to  reopen with reduced capacity, reservations to ensure compliance and mask mandates.  During this phase, we began to get back out there and do our part to help the economy rebound by supporting these places that have been closed for months.  We responsibly visited and supported many of our favorite places like ZooTampa.

At the close of the summer, we did our first overnight trip.  It was a Florida trip that included visits to Busch Gardens and Sea World with an overnight stay in Orlando.  It was a little uneasy to travel during a pandemic but we made the best of it.  However we also decided to cancel our end of year trip to Charleston until the pandemic is further under control and a vaccine and/or herd immunity was achieved.

While this year was pretty quiet for new places to visit, we did manage to get a new zoo visited by the end of the year with a trip to Jacksonville zoo to close out 2020.  

The reduced travel and photo safaris led me to get caught up on the migration to SmugMug.  All of the archive travel photos are now on the SmugMug site and the Pbase site was closed.  I am still working on labeling and organizing everything on SmugMug, but all the travel photography is now there.  There are now almost 80,000 photos on the site for you to enjoy.  All photos are available for purchase should you desire by clicking the Buy Photo link,  The prices are low and is used to support the website hosting and providing new content.

Website traffic continues to climb and we exceeded 10.6 million visitors this year.  Not too bad for an amatuer with no training in photography or running a website.  

I really have no clue what 2021 will have in store.  First we need to get a handle on the COVID-19 pandemic so the nation can fully recover.  By the close of the year, the vaccine has been released and mass vaccination has begun, but only time can tell how it will go.  While the vaccine begins administration, the numbers of cases are rapidly increasing again and just this week a new strand from the UK has been found in Colorado and California.  So fingers crossed it will get under control.

As for us, we have two weeks vacation planned for 2021, one in the Spring and one in the Fall.  No formal plans on the books but ideas kicked around have been Charleston, Louisiana and East Tennessee. Stay tuned for more as the time gets closer.