BEHIND THE SCENES: THE AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK AGAIN COVER

Last year—and by year, I mean the decade that was 2020–my husband and I were an hour from boarding a flight to Portugal when the first Covid-19 travel ban was issued. It was early March and 11 PM at JFK, and we stood there blearily trying to parse the garbled language in the order before pulling our bags from the flight and deciding to find a silver lining in a New York vacation instead. Over the course of the next few days, we kept a wary eye on the headlines abroad from a room in a fancy hotel in Midtown—which we got at a ridiculously low rate we now refer to as the “apocalypse special”—and had just enough time to eat some incredible food and be thoroughly freaked out by the ghost streets of the city before hightailing it home as we all collectively realized that the virus was about to take over our lives.