I think my wife and I are getting ready to stick our toes in the water again.
We haven’t gone anywhere that wasn’t necessary since Thanksgiving 2019, when we visited our daughter Pauline and her family in Guatemala City.
Since then we’ve been out of commission for two different reasons. First was my wife’s emergency surgery late last February, a surgery that knocked her out for six months with a colostomy and eventually a reversal.
Then came the pandemic.
Except for numerous doctor’s appointments, Nicole hardly left the house for a year. I’ve been out for groceries and prescriptions, but not much else.
As the pandemic got worse, it affected us more and more. Our original plan was to go to Virginia in late summer, but the surgery made that impossible. Then we were thinking of the holidays, and even though Nicole had recovered from her surgery, the pandemic was still enough of a problem that it wasn’t going to be reasonable to travel.
Then my mother died. It wasn’t unexpected. She was nearing her 94th birthday and had been ill for a long time, but it raised the question of when she would be buried and whether we could travel there.
We had pretty well decided we wouldn’t go anywhere until we received the vaccine.
Fortunately, my mother is being buried with my father at Arlington National Cemetery. He was interred in April 2008, and we crossed the country from California to attend his funeral. Between the pandemic and the demand for burials in such a place of honor, it was always going to be delayed.
In the interim, we finally were scheduled for the Moderna vaccine and we had the first dose last week. We’re scheduled for our second dose on March 23rd, and we also learned that my mother’s services would be on April 2nd.
So we scheduled our trip, flying in the day before and coming home a week later. It’s a bit bittersweet, because one of the main reasons for the trip is to see our grandchildren. If not for the pandemic, we probably would have stayed twice as long. But any time we spend with them adds at least a small risk of someone infecting someone else.
And even with two doses of the vaccine in our system, we’re both on the far side of 70 and don’t want to take any unnecessary chances. That’s why when we bought our airline tickets, we decided to fly first class. I was pleasantly surprised to find round-trip first class tickets for less than $400 each.
So we’re a little more than a month from getting out into the world.
Wish us luck.