My career requires me to travel. A lot.

I flew about 175,000 miles in 2019 and spent one weekend at home between mid-August and late December. There’s a lot of time spent on FaceTime with my patient wife and our rascals, 2- and 4-year-old boys.

But the rewards are great — my job has me travel the country for ESPN, from one major sporting event to the next. My primary job is as a producer on ESPN’s College GameDay, and as such my fall weekends are spent on college campuses around the country inside packed, 100,000-seat stadiums watching the best college football games each weekend. It’s a fun way to make a living, and I’ve also been lucky enough to have my family accompany me on some trips (my wife also travels a fair amount for her career). We all share the same spirit of adventure, thrill of discovering a new place and the simple joys of travel.

When COVID-19 spread to the United States in early March, I had a full schedule of work trips planned for the weeks ahead — Nashville, Las Vegas, Atlanta, plus a planned quick family getaway to Vermont. We also had a trip to Disney World planned for early May to serve as some well-needed family bonding time after my “busy season” (thankfully, we had not told the kids about the Disney trip, a good example why you should never tell kids under 6 about a Disney trip until you are actually at the airport).

It didn’t take long before we realized we wouldn’t be traveling much beyond our neighborhood for several weeks and now, it seems, months. A lifestyle that was go-go-go has quickly slowed down to a virtual halt.

And, admittedly, we have welcomed it.

We travel so much that sometimes we forget the best family bonding time occurs in our own home: an impromptu board game or family movie night or pretend games in the backyard or simply time spent in each other’s company, fully present, without a looming 6 a.m. flight the next morning. The only trips we are taking right now are bike rides to the park, save for some “virtual trips” we are taking to Disney World from our living room, thanks to virtual Disney rides we discovered on YouTube.

Right now, we have no idea when we will be traveling again. Hopefully it will be soon, as we miss adventuring as a family. We look forward to our annual week on Cape Cod in August and hope things have somewhat returned to normal by then. But we have seen and experienced too much in the world over the past month to have any expectations at all right now for what the future may hold. All we know is the present, and right now we are enjoying the time spent with each other — time we will never get back and time we will cherish forever.

— Drew Gallagher, contributor