Today we fly to Australia, land of mysterious animals, sublime landscapes, and stifling COVID restrictions.
We go to see our daughter, son-in-law, and six grandchildren. We haven’t seen them in three years! They were within weeks of flying to the states to see us in 2020 when COVID struck, international travel was halted, and both of our countries locked down. But even after things eased up in the U.S., Australia continued to impose heavy-handed restrictions and draconian quarantine requirements.
But, finally, Australia is opening up somewhat. As of about a week ago, the country is now allowing in vaccinated tourists, without requiring them to quarantine upon arrival for two weeks in a guarded and monitored facility. We, though, are coming in not as tourists but as parents, which the government at long last classified as “family members” who could qualify for exemptions from the entry prohibitions. For much of the two year lockdown, Australia wasn’t even letting their own citizens back in their own country if the lockdown hit while they were abroad! (Would that the original restrictions had been imposed a few weeks later, so that our daughter’s family could have made their planned trip. They would still be with us!)
Anyway, we plunged into the mountain of paperwork that Australia required for the exemption–birth certificate to prove we were our daughter’s parents, marriage certificate to prove that she married an Australia, citizenship papers all around, passports, and forms galore–and were approved.
So today we’re off! We will be in the air for some 18 hours, not counting the layovers in L.A. and Sydney, before we get to our destination in Adelaide. Yes, that is an ordeal. (The one consolation is that Qantas has a seat back entertainment system that has a library of hundreds of movies, old and new, as well as TV shows from around the world, games, and other diversions. I expect to watch at least six movies going and six more on the return trip.) We’ve made the trip several times before, so we know we can handle it.
We’ll be gone from March 1 to April 20. I intend to keep the blog going. I’ve written posts that are scheduled to come up for the rest of the week. But I’m thinking that I will take a few breaks, something that I have almost never done in all of my years of blogging, in which I have nearly always put up something every day.
Some of those breaks may be out of necessity, since we may be far from internet connections in the Outback or in the rainforests of Queensland, where I may have some speaking engagements. But some may be sheerly recreational, for when we go to the beach or to my grandson’s cricket games.
Mostly, though, we’ll be in the city, in touch via computer with the U.S. and the rest of the world, and I’m sure I’ll have lots I want to blog about.
Mornings in Australia are nights in the U.S., and vice versa, though there is a window in the late afternoon and early evening here when both sides are awake. (That’s when we do our FaceTime calls, which have sustained us over the last three years.) Also, when we fly there, we cross the International Dateline, which means we lose a day, meaning that Australia is a day ahead of us.
On our flight, we leave on Tuesday and get there on Thursday. So the day we will lose is Ash Wednesday! I’m sorry to miss that one, though we will be doing plenty of mortification of the flesh in those cramped airline seats. I’ll observe that first day of Lent on this blog, though, with a post to come up tomorrow.
Also, since Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are reversed from ours. We’ve been having single digit temperatures here in Oklahoma. But when we step out of the plane down under, we’ll feel the warm blast of Summer!
Three years is a long time in a child’s life. Two of our Australian grandchildren were kids when we saw them last. Now they are teenagers!
So it will be worth whatever it takes to see them!
Photo by Mark Harkin, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In