Hey! It’s Craig. Once again we are on the road (or water, as the case may be) and I’m “guest writing” along with Laura for this new chapter of A Traveling Kansas Girl: Covid Cruise!
An Introduction and an Explanation to Begin, from the World Travelers:
Things got really interesting yesterday (May 25). It was Day 11 of our 12 day cruise around the British Isles with Laura’s parents. Things had been, shall we say, flexible from the start, as Dublin had been scratched a few months before our sailing date due to vague Covid issues and replaced with a second day in Liverpool (no one ever asked for a second day in Liverpool, I don’t think). During the cruise, our final destination of Shetland Islands in the UK was scrapped because local government was going to require so much inspection as to be too time consuming to make sense, so operations got creative and we stopped in the sleepy French seaside town of Cherbourg and an extra day at sea added to our 12 day itinerary.
These are unprecedented times. Still. (Evidently.)
The last day before arriving at our final stop of Amsterdam meant we had time to do our verified Covid test for our flight home to the U.S. This test is done via an app and someone in an unidentified southeast Asian city watching as you open your test kit, swab your nose, and watch the result appear. We thought we’d wait and do this upon arriving in Amsterdam so we’d have cell signal to guarantee a better internet speed, but with 15 min per test and the four of us, we were looking at an hour, minimum and we knew we’d be requested to get off the ship promptly.
We heard in the lounge for suite guests that they were recommending people connect via the ship’s wifi, so Laura gave it a try back in our stateroom. She connected, got the live human on video, and set up her test and the timer to 15 minutes and proceeded to play a game on her iPad. A few minutes later, the timer ended and the Laura looked down at her test and said, “Oh God, I’m positive.”
That began a whirlwind of events, calls, anxiety, and a lot of sitting around. I’ll let Laura take it from here:
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