{"id":59507,"date":"2022-03-01T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=59507"},"modified":"2022-02-25T12:38:48","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T17:38:48","slug":"headed-to-fortress-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2022\/03\/headed-to-fortress-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Headed to Fortress Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today we fly to Australia, land of mysterious animals, sublime landscapes, and stifling COVID restrictions.<\/p>\n

We go to see our daughter, son-in-law, and six grandchildren.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t seen them in three years!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But even after things eased up in the U.S., Australia continued to impose heavy-handed restrictions and draconian quarantine requirements.<\/p>\n

But, finally, Australia is opening up somewhat.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We, though, are coming in not as tourists but as parents, which the government at long last classified as \u201cfamily members\u201d who could qualify for exemptions from the entry prohibitions.\u00a0 For much of the two year lockdown, Australia wasn\u2019t even letting their own citizens<\/em> back in their own\u00a0 country if the lockdown hit while they were abroad!\u00a0 (Would that the original restrictions had been imposed a few weeks later, so that our daughter\u2019s family could have made their planned trip.\u00a0 They would still be with us!)<\/p>\n

\n

Anyway, we plunged into the mountain of paperwork that Australia required for the exemption\u2013birth certificate to prove we were our daughter\u2019s parents, marriage certificate to prove that she married an Australia, citizenship papers all around, passports, and forms galore\u2013and were approved.<\/p>\n

So today we\u2019re off!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yes, that is an ordeal.\u00a0 (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.\u00a0 I expect to watch at least six movies going and six more on the return trip.)\u00a0 We\u2019ve made the trip several times before, so we know we can handle it.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll be gone from March 1 to April 20.\u00a0 I intend to keep the blog going.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written posts that are scheduled to come up for the rest of the week.\u00a0 But I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But some may be sheerly recreational, for when we go to the beach or to my grandson\u2019s cricket games.<\/p>\n

Mostly, though, we\u2019ll be in the city, in touch via computer with the U.S. and the rest of the world, and I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll have lots I want to blog about.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 (That\u2019s when we do our FaceTime calls, which have sustained us over the last three years.)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

On our flight, we leave on\u00a0 Tuesday and get there on Thursday.\u00a0 So the day we will lose is Ash Wednesday!\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry to miss that one, though we will be doing plenty of mortification of the flesh in those cramped airline seats.\u00a0 I\u2019ll observe that first day of Lent on this blog, though, with a post to come up tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Also, since Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are reversed from ours.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been having single digit temperatures here in Oklahoma.\u00a0 But when we step out of the plane down under, we\u2019ll feel the warm blast of Summer!<\/p>\n

Three years is a long time in a child\u2019s life.\u00a0 Two of our Australian grandchildren were kids when we saw them last.\u00a0 Now they are teenagers!<\/p>\n

So it will be worth whatever it takes to see them!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Photo by Mark Harkin, CC BY 2.0 <https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we start our flight to Australia to visit our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. Due to COVID restrictions, we haven’t seen them in three years! But now we can. I’ll probably take a few breaks, but my intention is to keep the blog going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":59519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,16,23,30,34],"tags":[237,951],"class_list":["post-59507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-family","category-international","category-medicine","category-personal","tag-australia","tag-grandchildren"],"yoast_head":"\nHeaded to Fortress Australia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Today we start our flight to Australia to visit our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. Due to COVID restrictions, we haven't seen them in three years! But now we can. 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