It’s the end of a truly beautiful visit home, but as the date of our return to Norway nears (tomorrow now), the relaxation and the family joy sadly grows its cracks, prepares itself to dissolve back into its virtual form for the coming months. A blessing as technology is for how it can connect us, this time together in person I will miss heartily.
Because of the new Covid strain first in the UK and now elsewhere, the next wave of travel restrictions has swept up to greet us for the journey back: a PCR test administered no less than 72 hours before arrival is now required to enter or transit through the Netherlands. We must have the negative results before boarding the flight. With approximately nine and a half hours between checking our bags and arrival time in the Netherlands, not to mention the fact that our 72-hour window begins at 12:30am, when no one I’m aware of is administering a Covid test, our timeframe for result turnaround became something like 57 hours.
Of course, the trouble is, nobody that we could find is promising results within that interval. Testing services seem to mostly start their clock on calculating result times from the moment samples are received by the lab, but getting into the fine print, samples are in many cases not sent to a lab any quicker than overnight, and our window keeps closing and closing. I’m not certain that we’ll have the results we need in time.
The test is taken now, and the clock keeps counting down. We are waiting and hoping, identifying contingencies and speaking to supervisors. If we make it onto our original flight, I suppose we can rest easy knowing that everybody around us has tested negative in the last 72 hours, but how are other people meeting this new requirement, I wonder? Or will we have to rebook on a different airline that won’t fly us through the Netherlands? I’ll let you know next week how things end up.
Today, I’m trying to spend a good last day with family: a walk with my dad and Gordi the Corgi this morning, a family piano sing-along last night. We’ll make one last delicious dinner. Then we’ll start our journey back.
Forgive me for a string these last few weeks, I realize, of unusually short and unusually-themed posts. I hope to get back more into the world of writing next week, and of course the #AuthorToolboxBlogHop will be returning in mid-January.
I have been doing some writing this last week post-Christmas: typing away with some daily word counts in the seven- or eight-hundreds, one halcyon day about a thousand. And buoyed up by that news of an upcoming publication, I’ve sent out a few short story submissions again in these last days. I’m setting a few writing goals for myself, which I’ll post about next week when I’ve had the time to finalize them. I think a good start to a new year.
Best wishes for the week ahead, and I hope to report smooth travels back when I post again next week. Cheers, happy new year, and keep writing,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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