I’m a traveler and explorer. I love seeing new places, meeting new people, and getting lost regularly.

As with the rest of the world, I haven’t been doing any of that due to the global pandemic, and before that, an evolution in my career cut down on the number of new passport stamps I received. The reality that my carry-on was collecting dust has been an itch that I couldn’t safely scratch.

So, one night as we lay in bed, my wife and I began trying to remember the last time only the two of us had gone anywhere that wasn’t to visit family and was longer than a weekend. We realized that it had been almost eight years, which wasn’t acceptable to either of us.

I told her to find a week that she could escape, and I’d take care of the rest.…