At a time when the coronavirus quarantine has kept us all at home, it’s safe to say that virtual travel is our best bet to see the world. Now online resources for virtual travel have a new place in our lives. While most of our daily activities have been stopped by the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown measures, we are restricted to not just our localities but our homes with our families.
Ordinarily, this is when people start to plan their summer travels, but it is unlikely now as we struggle to come to terms with the effect of this pandemic. However, armchair traveling has also had some boosts.
For most of our lives, virtual travel has not been a core part of what we do or who we are. It almost feels like a totally unnecessary adventure. Why would you want to go through a virtual experience when you can book some tickets and see things for yourself? There are many people who even think that virtual traveling is like browsing for the end of an unreleased movie. Why would you want to spoil the whole fun and experience of real-life with a virtual experience? So virtual tours, as good as they are, have not been at the top of our must-do list.
How a quarantine has changed everything
However, during this quarantine period where there is almost no movement and we are forced to sit in our homes, we’ve started looking for more ways to connect and interact with the outside world. This means virtual tours are now gaining more attention. Some people are even taking the opportunity to go on virtual “family vacations,” for fun and bonding.
If you have not joined this train already, it is not too late to jump on. There are a number of online resources for virtual travel, depending on your interest, where you want to go, and what you want to see.
Museum tours
One of the best resources for fans of virtual museum tours is Google Arts & Culture. If you understand what art is and the beauty of it, then an online resource that offers you access to more than 2500 museums worldwide has to be your best choice. If you are someone that naturally loves to visit the museum quietly, then this should be your go-to option.
Some of the museums that you can visit virtually with the Google Arts & Culture resource are the Tate Modern in London, Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Frida Khalo Museum, and Van Gogh Museum (for people that love arts specific to the artist). For lovers of fashion, you should visit the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There are some museums that already offer virtual tours through their own website. Examples of these museums are the Vatican and the Louvre in Paris.
Art & graffiti tours
Street art is usually very beautiful. Discovering it has become an experience that travelers enjoy in cities like Malmo, Buenos Aires, New York City, Berlin, Los Angeles, and many more. But now that people are unable to travel, they can still view street art through other means – virtual art tours.
Viewing street graffiti with virtual travel is like viewing a street from its beginning to the end. While doing this, you can even play your favorite music in the background and customize your art-viewing travel experience.
Main tourist attractions
You probably had your year planned, and this was supposed to be the time when you finalized your travels. While that is now unlikely to happen this year, you can still remember places you have visited in the past. Use this quarantine time to relive your experience from past travels, especially if you have been to some of the best tourist attractions in the world.
Some examples of some of the world’s best tourist attractions are the Pyramids of Giza, the Colosseum of Rome, Christ the Redeemer, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall Of China, and so many more. If you’ve been before, the virtual tours will help you re-live your experience as if you were there again! And if you haven’t yet visited, use the online resources for virtual travel to help you create your bucket list.
Nature walks
Your daily 9-5 routine might not give you enough time to appreciate the beauty of nature in the national parks. But you have the time now to see those things you’ve missed out on. Why not take a trip to some of the national parks with the National Parks Service? You can view some stunning landscapes in America because of the many conservation efforts that have been put into place.
Another option is a Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma virtual field trip, in order to see some of the best views. Thanks to the National Park Service, you can also enjoy a very interesting virtual tour of the Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone has up to nine webcams everywhere, all of which provide livestream feed.
You can also take a virtual walk around a classic English garden or just take a stroll through a Nevada ghost town.
NASA Virtual Tours
Whether or not you believe in the presence or possibility of life beyond planet earth, you would agree that NASA is doing a great job in spearheading space exploration. However, they also do a lot of visualization as well, which is good news for you in this case.
You can carry out your own virtual tour of NASA on your desktop. But in order to maximize your experience, you would be better off using a smartphone. This allows you to download and make use of the Google Expeditions app, which gives you an augmented reality trip to a NASA center. This trip takes you through the NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, and is a very thorough all-round tour for aircraft enthusiasts and also NASA novices. There is also the mission operation center of the Hubble Space Telescope that you can tour virtually.
One of the best specialties of NASA is visualization because they have to be able to give an accurate depiction and description of their study subject. So, if you want to see what outer space looks like, take a trip to NASA. The Exoplanet Travel Bureau is your spot for planets and colorful stars.
Conclusion
Virtual travel is an avenue for you to see places you have not been and learn things you did not know — from the comfort of your home. Since we are on quarantine, we can take advantage of this period to go to places without actually going anywhere. That is the beauty of virtual travel. It is also an avenue for fun and it reduces the strain that this quarantine places on all of us. Hopefully you will use these online resources for virtual travel to enrich your lives at this unique and challenging time.
Author Bio
Hey you have an amazing blog! I too am virtually touring places during quarantine by editing and posting old photos waiting for the national parks to fully open.
Thanks, Sudo! I’ve sure been enjoying your blog, too!