Our last vacation was in June 2019 … to Rome, Naples, and Sicily, a wonderful experience. Then came Covid, and traveling was shut down, as well as working in an office, dining out, and more. More than 1 million Americans died from covid and millions more worldwide. All of our lives were upended. Barney and I both got Covid in January 2022, his mild, mine rather rough. And now fully vaccinated and double-boostered, we are on our first vacation in three years (besides going to the cabin in Groveland).
After our usual late-night packing rush, we arose at 4:30am to take a 6:30 BART train. All was going well until we got to BART, and heard that the Berkeley Hills tunnel was closed due to … something not good. It turned out to be closed between Orinda and Rockridge, so eventually a train rolled into Rockridge from MacArthur and turned around to head to SFO, whew, only 30 minutes late! Luckily we had left super early because of expected long delays at security. We got to SFO just before 8:00am (our flight was at 10:45am) and breezed through security, another whew! A family behind us in security saw my Fairyland t-shirt and told us how much they like Fairyland which was great to hear. After coffees and a bit of strolling, we headed to our gate and loaded onto the plane. We sprang for economy premium seats which were surprisingly spacious, and seated at the bulkhead we had lots of room. I had though we’d need to being a lunch so we did pack one, and to our surprise they served a rather nice lunch and later a snack. We even had a bit of a nap after only 4-1/2 hours of sleep.
Then the pilot announced we’d be “holding” in the air and landing would be delayed 10 minutes. As we had only 45 minutes between flight this was a concern. The flight attendant told us where our gate would be and said the agent knew there were people coming from our flight. 10 minutes became 20 and then 30 as planes were being moved around on the ground and we could not get to the gate. Having almost de-stressed from a difficult week, I started to stress out about missing the flight, the last one today to Montreal. The flight staff made an announcement about letting people with short connections out first, which was nice but we had only 2 minutes before the doors to the next flight would close. Yikes! We got there, the next gate and down one flight, only to find the doors closed. I pleaded with the agent that we had just landed and run there, she was waiting for the other agent to come, and the other agent finally did and we ran on board. We were the last ones on, the flight attendant helped us find space for our carryons, thank goodness we are traveling light and did not check bags!
Settled in our seats with a big sigh of relief - really big - we could relax and hope that all would go well on the last leg of the trip.
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