It was unusually warm this past week in Minnesota with sunny weather in the 70s. That never happens in November and we’ve been ‘living outside’ every day. Tomorrow it looks like we get back-to-normal in a hurry with a cold front dropping the temperatures into the 30s with rain quickly turning to snow.

In Minnesota, it’s not an exaggeration to say these might be the last nice weather days until next spring.

Last year, we escaped the Northern cold for three weeks in Florida. This coming winter, we’ll double-down on that plan by leaving late January until mid-March. As I wrote earlier, we were hesitant to book anything during the middle of the pandemic, but as winter gets closer we fInally conceded.

The good news is prices are really inexpensive. We found two terrific places on AirBNB to stay. For the three weeks we’ll be near Orlando, for the second three weeks we’ll be in Gulfport. I have a board meeting at a resort in Naples between the two stays.

Although we’ll be down there for quite a while, we decided to fly down and use a rental car, rather than drive. We could save some $$$ by driving down our own vehicle down, but that would be 24 hours of driving each way (2-3 days).

Since the cost of airfare and rental cars is also relatively depressed during the pandemic, we decided to save ourselves the drive. Overall, the trip is more than 2x the number of days we spent last year, but roughly the same price.

Since there is still a good degree of uncertainty about the pandemic, we made sure the AirBNB rentals were 100% cancelable. Florida is largely ‘open’ right now, but who knows what the situation will be 75 days from now? If the state is ‘closing-up’ we can still enjoy the nice weather, but not being able to go the beach or other places would really stink. Hoping for the best … fingers crossed!

Anyone else deciding to travel this winter, or is everyone buckled down?

Image Credit: Pixabay