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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.

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