The first time I ever stepped on a plane, walked into an airport or left the United States was in early March 2020, just a few weeks before the world shut down. My family took a trip to the Nickelodeon Resort in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. In hindsight, the timing feels unreal. It now sits in my memory as the last moment before everything changed.
I was 12 years old, so the airport felt impossibly big. Everything from the security lines to the loudspeaker announcements felt overwhelming, but in an exciting way. The moment the plane lifted off the ground is still one of the clearest memories I have of the trip.
Landing in the Dominican Republic felt like arriving on a new planet. I remember the warm, heavy air that hit as soon as we stepped outside and the way everything looked brighter and more saturated. Even now, most of the details are fuzzy, but the feeling of being far from home has stayed with me.
The resort itself wasn’t as heavily Nickelodeon-themed as I imagined it would be, since it shared property with a more standard adult-oriented resort. The only truly themed area I remember was a water park with a few cartoon touches. The rest of the place felt calm and surprisingly empty for somewhere meant to be lively.
One day we were walking on the beach, when a group of vendors walked up carrying a monkey on a leash. They put the monkey on my shoulders and tried to get photos of me, insisting afterward that we had to pay. The monkey’s name was Obama, and they kept calling him a racial slur, which I didn’t understand at the time.
I never felt uncomfortable during the moment because I didn’t grasp what was happening, and I’m even including the photo of me smiling with the monkey in this article. It captures how unaware I was of the situation around me. It’s one of those memories that is strange and funny to look back on now.
Another thing I remember is the Machete Burger, which was an enormous burger the resort served. It was bigger than my head and seemed absurd in a way only a resort can pull off. Little details like that stuck with me more than any typical vacation activity.
The rest of the trip blended together into flashes of the pool, the beach and the restaurants. I just remember that I enjoyed myself, even if the specifics are hard to piece together now. At the time, COVID-19 was something adults talked about vaguely on the news, but I didn’t understand the impact it would soon have.
Within weeks of returning home, school shut down, my family canceled any future travel and everything felt uncertain. That Punta Cana trip became the last “normal” vacation we took before the pandemic changed our lives. Because of that, it stands out more vividly than I would have ever expected.
As a college freshman now, I see the trip as an odd, frozen moment in my childhood. It was my first time seeing life outside of what I knew, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Since then, I’ve taken many flights for different reasons, but none feel quite like that first one.
I haven’t left the country again since, but that trip planted the idea that I want to. Even with faded memories, it reminded me that the world is bigger and more surprising than I understood at twelve. It left me wanting to see more whenever the chance comes again.
Whitford can be reached at [email protected].
