Places Oklahomans Are Being Warned Not to Travel Right Now

It’s always fun finding out where friends and coworkers disappear to during the holidays. Living in a small Oklahoma military town, that question gets especially interesting, because there’s no telling where anyone actually calls home.

Take my little circle of friends. Only one of us is truly Oklahoma born and raised, straight out of Lawton. The rest of us are scattered like a dropped deck of cards. California. Louisiana. Texas. New York. Minnesota. Idaho. Put us in a room together and you’ve basically got a regional census happening over chicken wings.

Naturally, when the big family holidays roll around, everyone heads back to their own corner of the map, for better or worse. Christmas in south Louisiana can feel more like late spring, while I still can’t fully wrap my head around a holiday buried under New York or Idaho snow. That kind of cold just feels fictional to an Oklahoma brain.

Oklahoma Has Cargo Shorts Christmases

Lately though, that pattern has been shifting. As we get older and families start growing, more people are skipping the hometown trip altogether and creating their own traditions. Holiday cruises. Cancun at Christmas. Caribbean New Year’s. Sounds nice, at least in theory.

This year, that wanderlust comes with a few raised eyebrows. There are more than a few travel advisories floating around, especially for places Americans are being warned to avoid. Some of the countries on that list won’t surprise you at all. A couple of them might.

And it definitely makes those holiday destination conversations at work sound a little different than they used to.