Skip to main content

In Phoenix

 It’s 10:00 pm, the end of a long day that began at 4:15 am when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I waited for the dawn, going over in my mind what else I needed to do before we left home. Remembered to stick a thumb drive in my already very stuffed carry on bag that contains all the old family photos that the cousins in the UK might enjoy seeing. 

Picked over the various make up accoutrements I had in my bathroom cabinet—I do want to be a little bit “glam” if I am going to be sitting in Business Class for ten hours. Of course, for part of that I will be (hopefully) fast asleep with my face mask and my eye mask so I will probably look more like a mummy than a glamourous film star jetting off to a new movie. Not that many movies are being made in these COVID times anyway.

Oh and speaking of COVID tests, yes, I had mine. The two and a half hour drive (bless GPS, 100% accurate in its estimate) was uneventful except for the increasing heat as we approached Phoenix. Even through the a/c in the car, we could feel the rise in temperature outside. It was 105 degrees F when we arrived at the testing site at 11:00 am; we were glad to stay in the car. The test took about 15 minutes from registration until the lab guy swabbed my nose and said “Results by 7:00 pm.” 7:00 pm??!! I didn’t think they’d take that long and although I tried to relax and reassure myself that there would be no problem with the test, I kept thinking about it. 

The friends I am staying with, former neighbors of ours in Winterhaven, were great at distraction. They talked and talked, took me over to Costco so we could walk our 10,000 steps in relative coolness, and we celebrated when, at 5:30 pm the test result arrive in my email “Negative for COVID.” Yay!! I then went online, completed my landing documents for the UK and then the airport app VeriFly. I couldn’t check in online because I fly on a foreign (Canadian) passport but that’s okay, that happens all the time.

So, all is well thus far, time to turn the iPad off and go to sleep. 5:00 am will come around and the next leg begin.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 2024 and blogging

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most ...
12 comments
Read more

Sunday in Richmond Park & Memories

  One of the reasons I came back to London after Ireland was to keep a date with my cousin Elizabeth: a Sunday morning walk in Richmond Park. When I moved to England in May of 1978, I rented a room in a house near Richmond Park. I'd heard of the room through a colleague at McGill University's Human Resources Department, where I was working as a Senior Clerk. Montreal had become a bit difficult for me to be in owing to a twice-broken heart and a feeling I wasn't going anywhere at McGill. It seemed like an omen, then, on the plane returning from South Africa in January of 1978--I keep promising to write about that--that I came across an article in a magazine about young Canadians living in London. I'd always loved the idea of being in London what with growing up on a diet of British movies and then all of the articles about Swinging London in the 1960s/early 1970s.  By the time I arrived at Mirabel Airport, I had the perfect antidote to my wounded pride over South...
Post a Comment
Read more

Life on board the Queen Mary

Passenger's log on the Queen Mary 2: Dec 9th - First Day at Sea Didn't sleep well--think it was the soused mackerel at dinner. Anyway, R and I woke up at about 6:00 am and discussed the order of the day. Quite the swell outside and I can feel the roll of the ship. (No seasickness thank goodness!) Despite the mackerel, I was hungry so we went to King's Court at 6:30 a.m. Buffet with loads of choice of course. We sat in an alcove looking out at the ocean. Our server was from Croatia, Slavan. I asked him my burning question of the day--why did we get a free bottle of wine but a regular bottle of Diet Coke cost $3.75? Diet Pepsi is $1.00 less. Fruit juices are free on tap. Coffee, tea, milk, ditto. But you have to pay for soft drinks. Very odd. Slavan says it is because Cunard can't get a good contract with Coke. Hmmm.... our local School District back in Sierra Vista can negotiate .50 a can for the soda machines in the teachers' lounges but Cunard has to cha...
Post a Comment
Read more