Rats! The Bahamian government has decided that in order to come into their one needs to have a negative PCR Covid test—that is the test where they stick a swab up your nose. However, the specimen must be collected no more than 5 days before your arrival into The Bahamas. I am landing on Tuesday, so the earliest I could get the swab was on Thursday morning. Oh, but the test takes 3 days to yield results, the lab doesn’t send reports over the weekend, and this is Easter weekend anyway. So the earliest I could get my results was today, Monday, and I am departing today at 10:45 pm from San Francisco, which means that if I don’t get the Bahamian Travel Health Visa by 3 pm I would not have time to get to the airport.
I did pick up the negative result at 8 am, and rushed back to my house to scan it and load it unto the website of the Travel Authority of the Bahamas, only to receive a message back advising me that I should get a response within 24 hours. Arghh! I waited for a couple of hours, but nothing. So I called and was told in a very charming British accent that my call was important but there were 45 people in the queue ahead of me. Finally, after an hour and fifteen minutes of hanging by the phone, I reached a very sympathetic lady who listened to my tale of woe and with many a “tsk, tsk” told me she would let the visa tech know about my plight, and said goodbye with the encouraging note that “you should have an answer by 4 pm”. That would be 1 pm my time, so again I waited patiently, refreshing the Travel Authority webpage over and over again hoping my approval would show up. DJ and Ronnie were coming to pick me up at 3 pm to take me to the bus, so that was going to be the moment of truth. Finally, at 2:50 pm I got the notification that my visa had been approved, pending my payment of the $60 fee. I rushed to the computer, paid with my credit card, and was just printing the fully executed visa when DJ rolled in! I had made it on the nick of time!
The boys drove me to Modesto, where I took the bus to the BART station in Pleasanton, and from where I could take the metro all the way to the airport. The bus got stuck in traffic caused by a truck that had tipped over, so now it was the turn of the driver to be all anxious about not arriving on time. I was cool as a cucumber because my flight was still 5 hours away, and in fact got to the airport around 7:30 pm, with lots of time to spare. And a good thing I had the leisure time, because they had moved things around and it took me some time to find the correct terminal, check in (waving proudly my brand new visa), get through security, and have dinner.
The airport looks like it has been emptied by the plague,
with everyone wearing masks and staying quite separate from each other. As much
as we might want to “go back to normal”, it is clear that we still have a long
way to go. I am glad, however, that I am back in the circuit and am looking
forward to my week in the Bahamas.
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