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August 2, 2020
The day after Cameron and Selina’s wedding we sat on the back porch and sipped mimosas while the bride and groom opened their presents. There were some delightfully personal gifts that hadn’t been on their registry, but the gift that got the biggest reaction was the ice maker. The perils of well water had been partially eased! My favorite part is that I think about that morning every time I scoop myself some freshly made filtered ice.
With the wedding complete, I threw some dirty clothes* in a suitcase to set off on my first adventure out of state since the lockdown had begun. My mom had driven down from Washington to California with my sister, so now I was driving back with her for my own visit.
*I figure, you have to take dirty clothes to your mom’s house. Also with all of the wedding preparation, laundry fell off my priority list.
Road Trip!
We spent our first night at the Railroad Park Resort in Dunsmuir, right at the tippy top of California.
Each ‘hotel room’ was in its own train car. This was ours:
I know you’re dying to see what it looked like inside!
It was a bit of a culture shock traveling during the pandemic- like traveling in a very foreign country where social protocols aren’t second nature. I’d figured out how to shop at the grocery store, but how do you check into a hotel? or go to a restaurant? How are we supposed to eat on the road?! The restaurant was offering take out, so we could eat at the picnic tables outside, or take our food to our train car. Between the restaurant and the front desk office and our train car, we forgot to bring a mask more often than not. It’s funny to me now thinking about how awkward it all was at the beginning.
The second night we stayed at a hotel on the edge of this beautiful walking path by a river:
It felt so good to be out adventuring again. So far this trip was pretty great, but the part I was most looking forward to happened on Day 3. I got us out of bed at 6am to hit the road.
Let me preface this next story with a toast that is often heard on the last night of a cruise: There are big ships, there are small ships, there are ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are FRIENDships, and may they always be. As I’ve said before, one of the best and worst things about working on ships are the friendships you make. They can be the absolute best, but the odds of seeing these people again in person are very slim. If you’re not assigned to the same ship again, your vacations may not align, so even if you want to go visit them while you’re off the ship, they may not be home. Or, if EVERYONE is home (like, say, in a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic), the borders are closed and you’re supposed to stay home. I consider it a freakin’ miracle when I get to see my friends again.
So I can’t even tell you how thrilled I was when I figured out my friend Erich (who you’ll recall from the Golden Princess), who lives in Massachusetts, was visiting a friend in Seattle, and they would be road tripping to California, leaving on the day my mom and I were scheduled to arrive in Washington. We arranged for our paths to cross for lunch in Olympia (He was heading for the coast and we were coming up Interstate 5).
It was like jumping in a swimming pool on a hot day.
Time flew by as we caught up and chatted with each other’s road trip buddy and before we knew it, we had stayed longer than we had intended. So far, Erich is still the only ship friend I’ve managed to see in real life (as opposed to ship life). Our group chat continues to this day, where we sometimes marvel at how much longer we’ve been virtual friends than we were real life friends.
Sequim
Up in Washington it was about 40 degrees (fahrenheit) cooler than it was in Sacramento (where there was a record breaking number of days over 100 degrees in August). Since my mom had moved to Sequim over a decade ago, I have mostly visited in the winter (it just worked out that way). Now it was summer! I had heard stories of how she’d taken other people to the Olympic Game Farm, but I had never been. Finally it was my turn!
At the Olympic Game Farm, the animals are free to roam. When you drive through, they come up and say hello.
My expectations had been sufficiently lowered so that I was surprisingly impressed! It was really fun to get that close to the animals.
After a week, I flew back to Sacramento on my first pandemic plane ride.
Flying
This year I was surprised to notice that when anyone asked how my flight was and I answered with a monosyllabic word that implied that there hadn’t been any major drama, they would pause and wait for me to continue as if there had to be more to the story. Then it would dawn on me that they hadn’t flown on an airplane since the world had shut down. So for those of you who have safely stayed home, I’ll tell you what it was like, for me, to fly during the pandemic. My first flight was from Seattle to Sacramento in August 2020. I loved it. The airport was empty, security was a breeze, there were plenty of seats available while I was waiting to get on the plane and Southwest was still requiring that the middle seat be left open. It was like everything that was annoying about flying was replaced by the inconvenience of wearing a mask. I was sold! Flying should always be this way! I felt pretty safe considering that now it was a much bigger faux pas to fly if you were sick at all. Everyone was wearing masks and it seemed like there was a lot more hand washing and sanitizing than there had been in the past (I know I was washing my hands every chance I got). I did find it ironic that people worked so hard to stay 6 feet apart in the airport, but once we were in the aisle on the plane we were pretty much as smooshed together as usual.
In December 2020 I flew from Sacramento to Denver and back on United (more on that trip later). On the way there I managed a window seat with no one in the middle and wasn’t so lucky on the way back. My visit was between the Thanksgiving and Christmas rush to avoid the big crowds. It was interesting to compare the difference between Seattle Tacoma Airport, Denver International Airport (DIA- it’s what the locals call it) -both of which are huge – and Sacramento Airport (which is comparatively tiny). Seattle and Sacramento airports felt cleaner, but that may have been because DIA was doing some major construction in the terminal.
My next trip was in May 2021 (after I’d been vaccinated) to go see my mom again. I flew between Sacramento and Seattle on Alaska. This trip made me think of my flight from Melbourne to San Francisco in March 2020. That time I was fresh off the ship I had been on for what felt like weeks on end while the world had shut down. No one knew what was going on and what was safe. Masks weren’t required yet, but my buddies on the medical team on the ship had stuffed my pockets with a variety of masks before I’d left. The process was new and awkward and the extra precautions felt uncoordinated. Now, fourteen months later I had been vaccinated and suddenly the mask I had been habitually wearing for over a year felt superfluous again. It was nice not to worry about getting sick. On my last flight, the staff at the airport, the flight attendants and even the Captain flying the plane continuously stressed that even though the CDC guidelines had changed, everyone was required to wear a mask covering their nose and mouth in a way that implied that there were lots of people complaining about having to wear the mask or were needing to be reminded to put one on.
On the next episode, you’ll get to meet the newest member of the family…