Travel Day December 17
December 17, 2021
When you live in an uncertain world, that uncertainty spills over into all aspects of your life. We hadn’t done any real ‘travel’ since our last major trip in the summer of 2019. This trip was supposed to have happened in the summer of 2021, but was canceled in late spring.
We got a generous voucher from Viking (which turned out to not be as generous as we first thought), but of course prices on everything went up as a result of the pandemic as well, so money didn’t stretch quite as far. When a trip that was comparable came up for late December/early January, we decided to go for it. There was a clear downward trend on the virus when we decided, and going during the off season stretched the voucher a little further.
Then Delta took off and restrictions started popping up. We were as vaccinated as we could get, and it was beginning to feel like the voucher wouldn’t persist if we were to back out of the trip. We did want to see the places that were a part of the trip, and we were being pretty careful with wearing masks in anywhere public, even when early everyone else wasn’t wearing a mask., so we persisted.
As we got within the last few days, we started getting conflicting information about when we needed to get our pre-boarding Co-vid testing. As all of the parts were playing out, we decided that if one of us came back positive, maybe staying home for now wouldn’t be so bad (and it would allow our travel insurance to kick in). With some helpful hand-holding from our travel agent extraordinaire (and a fun volleyball teammate back in the day!), Sonya Yassi, (check her out…we recommend her without any reservations and a full-hearted endorsement). we made it through the preliminaries with only minimal groaning and gnashing of teeth.
Less than 24 hours before we were to leave, our tests came back negative, so we began our packing and preparing in earnest.
December 17, 2021 Travel Day
The day started at 6 a.m. as we completed final preparations for leaving the house at 8 a.m. We left the house around 8:15 a.m. After a stop at Kroger for nasal spray we were on our way to Indianapolis. Zach Welch, our nephew took us to the airport, arriving at a little before 10 a.m. With all the COVID-19 requirements, we had no idea how long it would take to get boarding passes, check bags and clear security. We weren’t allowed to check in from home. At the kiosk, we put in our passports and flight locator and were told to wait for an attendant, who took us to a specific line for international flights. Viking and American Airlines had prepared us well as we had all the necessary documentation. It took the airline employee several minutes to enter all the data, but in a relatively short time we had checked our bags and had boarding passes. Security wasn’t too busy and that went smoothly as well. All total it took about 45 minutes from terminal door to gate – not bad!
Our first flight was Indy to JFK on a regional carrier. As we left Indy it was cloudy with slight turbulence, but once we were above the clouds things smoothed out. The sky cleared as we approached New York so we were able to see the New York skyline.
We had several hours at JFK, which was a good thing. We have never flown into JFK. It is a huge airport with several terminals. The air train traveling between terminals is accessed from baggage claim, which meant another trip through check in and security. At check in we were issued new boarding passes with additional checks of our documents and COVID-19 requirements. Neither check in and security were busy when we arrived, so the process was relatively painless. We arrived at the gate without incident. We each ate a barely warm overpriced burger on a stale bun and shared a bottle of water, finishing off our meal with the delicious snacks Joyce packed ( sorry Progressive guy trying to keep us from becoming our parents).
