[PilotMan]

Good mental health update, and it makes me somewhat of a hypocrite.

We've been following guidelines and we've been very careful while out, and minimizing our coming and going. Our spring break trip was coming up, planned and booked for a year. We needed to go. We're leaving one home for another, and no other exposure there except for a couple grocery store runs and gas stations. We could 'exercise' outdoors, and enjoy some time in the sun, together and away.

Legally, we were defying state orders not to leave the state. Legally, where we were going was trying to dissuade people from coming, but it wasn't illegal. The owner had told us to use it or lose it. Which was frustrating, but they weren't giving us our money back. So that was a big impetus. I wasn't about to lose that kind of money.

This was our 6th trip to our favorite destination and it was the final trip for our family of five. Our oldest is gone to college next year and that will be that. We did almost everything that we needed to do (while visiting), and it felt like a reset. Our old beast of a minivan ran flawlessly and she's now coming up on 220k miles. Having all that over is a huge relief.

Next up for me on the work horizon? Not much. The company and union tried to come up with volunteer time off plans, but they fell flat. Almost nobody took them (I was not eligible for any of them), and I think May in Newark will be severely overstaffed. None of that will impact me though. I think I said that I went NQ for landings, and now I've gone Non Qual for recency of experience. So I can't do anything until I go to training again. They closed the training center for cleaning and it was supposed to open yesterday, but they extended that until the end of the month.

So now....I'm not working, and once it does open back up again, I'll be at the back of the line. They will be pushing to get all the guys in who need their legal training first to keep them flying and then the other guys who have already dropped will be last (I'm guessing, I mean that's how I would do it.) I would guess that I have at least a month off now, and my friend thinks it could be June or even July. That's not all bad. My going NQ was not my fault, so I'm still getting paid to basically extend my vacation. I certainly can't complain about that right now.

The next big question after that will be the potential furlough notices that would go out on July 1. There has been some optimism about some flights coming back in mid May, so maybe my the end of June we'll have a better path to predict. But if things continue as they are, there's no question that I need to be planning and stuffing the savings account.

Traveling was an interesting experience. The roads were open in some places and surprisingly busy in others. Overall, as we got further south, traffic picked up. The overall feeling was that where we were was about 2 weeks behind where we'd come from. It's a pretty conservative area, and while some people were trying to take it serious, there was a lot of feeling that this was just generally an unnecessary pain. Coming back home again, traffic kept dropping as we got further north. Kentucky, by far, had the least traffic of anywhere else. It was an interesting experience. One that we were all happy for. It was an escape, if even for a little while.