The vacation I’ve been talking about for a couple of months now turned into a trip back to the “bad old days” of the pandemic. While the calendar may have said March of 2022 the past week and a half, I was stuck back in March of 2020 for many of the past few days.
It starts with the arrival at Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee, where masks are required as soon as you enter the building. Nevermind that I just shared a shuttle bus from my hotel with some of the very same people and none of us were masked up. The plexiglass shields are still in place so I can’t hear a darn thing the counter agent is telling me–and I can’t read lips to help out either. Eventually, everybody just leans around the plexiglass to be understood.
The masks stay on–except for the 5-seconds you need to pull it down for TSA to match your mug to the picture on your drivers license or passport–throughout the wait at the gate. However, those nursing their Starbucks coffee use that as a loophole to keep their masks off–even through they are having a sip every five minutes and are instead talking to their travel companions the rest of the time. And of course, the mask stays on on-board the airplane for the entire flight –unless you are enjoying your non-alcoholic drink or snack mix–or unless you are the aforementioned Starbucks drinkers who continue to nurse that $12 airport latte with hourly sips occasionally nibbles on the biscotti they also brought aboard.
Our journeys between three airports and two flights meant my wife and I spent 13-hours straight masked up–with the heavy-duty KN-95 masks–in some incredibly humid climates. And I have the “maskne” to prove it.
But where we really went back in time was almost everything we did in Turks and Caicos. We had to prove that not only were we fully-vaccinated just to get onto our flight, we needed to have a negative COVID test done in the 72-hours before departure. And our papers were closely inspected (at the airport in the United States–not upon arrival in TCI, where you would think they would be most concerned about us being COVID-free). In addition, anytime you are inside a business your mask must be on. That includes shops, golf clubhouses, restaurants without outdoor dining, and the lobby of your resort.
Everywhere you go in the Turks there are still hand sanitizer bottles–and every shop owner and employee is quick to remind you to “SANITIZE YOUR HANDS, PLEASE” as soon as you walk in. A security guard at the grocery store near our resort wouldn’t let people in without spraying their hands with something out of a plastic bottle. “No shirt, no spray, no service” should have been posted on the door. Signs warned of limits on the number of people allowed in a store at one time. Four was the lowest number for some ice cream shop. Restaurant tables were still ridiculously spread out in dining rooms and even on outdoor patios. The housekeeping crew doused every surface in our unit–including the floor–with some industrial-smelling anti-viral compound, even though it was just my wife and I using the room.
It wasn’t until I pulled the rental vehicle out of the garage at Miami International Airport following our flight back to the US that I felt like I could actually relax on this trip. It was a glorious five days in Florida of not having to mask up to enter a building, or walk back to the vehicle because I forgot a mask, or dig through my carryon to find a mask. Of course, the FAA gives you one more blast from the past by requiring you to mask up the entire time you arrive at Orlando International to fly back to Milwaukee.
So while our trip was a nice vacation from the drudgery of winter here in Wisconsin, our return will prove to be a nice vacation from the drudgery of thinking we can control the spread of a virus with pointless activities.
