While waiting at Gate C7 at the Nashville airport, a thought occurred to me: Might ours turn out to be one of those “unruly passenger gets duct-taped to the seat” kind of flights?

Such is among the possibilities for air journeys these days, a time when travel of any sort poses potential hazards not even contemplated a couple of short years ago.

A couple of long, short years ago.

It was to be our first out-of-state trip for Kayne and me since – coincidentally, we hoped – the week of the most recent Nashville tornado. And it was our first flight together since ... I’m not even sure.

San Antonio, May 2019? Maybe.

We’d booked this trip some weeks earlier, back when COVID vaccines seemed to be turning the health tide in a positive direction despite the many vax-resistant knobheads in Tennessee and other red states.

We’d had our shots, and so felt reasonably safe. Then the Delta variant increasingly took hold, complicating matters.

Events large and small across the country have been canceled or postponed because of it. Five stops on Garth’s stadium tour. The Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, for a second year in a row. On a more personal note, my 50th high school reunion.

Even the National Rifle Association, faced with an opponent it could neither buy off with campaign donations nor metaphorically shoot with verbal attacks, canceled its annual meeting in Houston.

But we stuck with our (ahem) guns, taking the additional safety step of ordering KN95 masks to double-up with our standard cloth versions for the four hours we’d spend inside a metal tube with 100-plus strangers of possibly dubious hygiene standards.

We’re firm believers in the benefits of visiting other places. As Mark Twain wrote in “The Innocents Abroad”: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

It’s also fun, and it had been too long since we’d experienced those exciting, and occasionally anxious, feelings that come from being on the go.

I soon experienced one of the anxious feelings: The nagging suspicion that I was forgetting something important. (Like the time I forgot a jacket to chilly England in December, and Kayne somehow forgot her contacts.) I eventually subdued it with my usual remedy: If I need it, I’ll buy another.

The destination was San Diego, a new one for both of us, chosen in roughly equal parts because:

• It’s about as far as you can get from Nashville on a nonstop flight

• It has a range of attractions

• It’s cool, even in August.

It did not disappoint.

We started with the zoo, a world-renowned facility that, while providing several agreeable hours of diversion including my first personal observation of koalas, also reminded me that I have mixed feelings about putting wild animals behind barriers for the entertainment of human beings. (I may have to turn that attention to the Nashville Zoo at some point.)

We ended with a baseball game between the hometown Padres and the visiting Philadelphia Phillies. That served as a reminder that, as much as I enjoy going to Sounds games, there is a vast difference between watching Triple-A players among a few thousand fans and, say, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Bryce Harper (who rocketed a home run to right in his second at-bat) among an enthusiastic, near-capacity crowd of 40,927.

In between those two activities we did an illuminating tour of the aircraft carrier Midway, a symbol of American military might from after World War II through the first Gulf War. We rented a car and drove to Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve for a trek up and downhill and along the Pacific beach. And we swung back through La Jolla to gaze upon seals, but we either went to the wrong spot or they were off-duty.

We visited Old Town, a mostly re-created version of early San Diego, engaged in extended and not entirely sober conversation with a couple from Las Vegas who we’ll never see again, and learned that our hotel is supposed to house a couple of resident ghosts. Neither made an appearance.

And, of course, we did our best to sample a variety of local food offerings, which included some rather disappointing Mexican, totally satisfactory Thai, some sliders and meat pies that went under the rubric of New Zealand fare, and quite possibly the best crabcake sandwich I’ve ever consumed. (To my fellow Mississippi Coastians: This includes the Vancleave Special from Rosetti’s.)

All in all it was a reasonable reintroduction to the outside world, with no in-flight dustups or other snags. We’re already thinking of what might be the next, bigger step.

And booster shots.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]