To stay or not to stay in a New Jersey hotel?

Summer is travel season, and everyone’s trying to figure out a way to keep their summer travel plans but do them pandemic style.

Yes, I have seen and heard about people renting villas so that they have less contact with people, but that’s a very pricey vacation. <any families are opting for RV vacations and embarking on great road trips that aren’t too far from home. But to tell you the truth, RVs don’t have room service, so that’s really not my style.

I am a hotel girl. And it doesn’t have to be five-star, top-of-the-line luxury resort hotel, either. As long as it’s pretty enough, clean enough, and will bring me my coffee in the morning, I’m good to go. That’s why any other vacations aren’t for me.

So, in the age of COVID-19, this brings up an interesting dilemma in my household. I am in desperate need of a good hotel stay and my husband is adamantly opposed to staying in a hotel. I keep trying to convince him than any hotel we would go to would be following CDC guidelines to the letter, keeping everything clean and sanitized and all socially distanced and what have you. But he is convinced that COVID-19 is lurking behind any hotel door, sweeping through the lobby and tucking in with you at night. And it doesn’t help my cause that over the weekend we hung out with a few friends who said, “Oh yeah. He’s right!!!! I would never stay in a hotel room right now.”

Sigh.

Granted, hubby has some health issues that could put him into a higher risk category. On the other hand, he also has the COVID-19 antibodies, which could potentially keep him safer than the average person. Maybe. I keep trying to tell him that hotel rooms are cleaner than they’ve ever been in our lifetimes, but he keeps saying he’d rather do a staycation this year. I did consider the idea, until I realized that a staycation means he’s home from work too, and so I still cook dinner and make the bed, and unless he wants to be my personal chef, I’m going to make both of us breakfast in the mornings. It’s making a hotel stay seem even more and more attractive. I still have a couple of weeks to talk him into it.

The post above reflects the thoughts and observations of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Judi Franco. Any opinions expressed are Judi's own.