Well, I tried.

After all the drama and calling and checking and rechecking and booking and stressing, today was the day.

I rented a car from the Palm Springs airport and headed to LAX. No traffic. Everything good so far.

I go to check in and present all my necessary paperwork. The lady starts tapping around on her keyboard and says: you aren’t able to fly until May 14th.

What???

She keeps looking and tapping and looking some more to try to find out more information. I get the feeling that she’s basically looking at the same unclear, confusing, and contradictory information that we have been looking at for the last few weeks.

Another lady comes by and she doesn’t know either. If these people, who work in the international terminal, don’t know who can travel to where, then who does know?

About 30 minutes go by and they call a supervisor to try to find out. At this point I’m starting to sweat and feel super uneasy about the whole plan. I fear getting off the plane, halfway around the world in London, and being told I was unable to transfer there. Based on the beginning of my journey, and this ever changing climate with travel restrictions etc, who knows.

She gets off the phone and the supervisor said that I’m good to go…oh, but wait. That damn covid test that I spent the last 3 days stressing over is invalid. They are valid from the time you took the test for 72 hours. It was my understanding that once you got your results, that’s when the clock started ticking on the 72 hours. Nope. Unbeknownst to me, mine was invalid before I even left the house.

The good thing is, that there is a rapid covid testing site on site at LAX. The results typically come in 40 minutes. Okay perfect. I hustle my ass down about 3/4 of a mile, already sweating and in a slight panic, to the site only to find out the turn around time is 3-5 hours. Considering my flight was going to be in 2 hours, that wouldn’t work. Another roadblock.

I consider rebooking for tomorrow, but the flights that are available are different transit cities and they would require different paperwork and who knows what the rules would be. At this point I’m completely overwhelmed and feel totally defeated. I don’t want to give up, but I can’t help but to feel as though now is just not the time to fly. What if I go there and the countries decide to lock down again and I’m stuck indefinitely? It all came crashing down. After much contemplation, several phone calls, and multiple text messages I pulled the plug.

I got back on the rental shuttle and headed back to budget to get a car to drive home. I got to the counter before I realized I didn’t even complete the reservation I was trying to make. Fortunately I was able to get a car and I was able to drive home. What. A. Day.

The good news is my dad is seemingly doing better by the day and we will just have to continue to talk on the phone and FaceTime him until things loosen up a bit.

I came home to these sleeping beauties. They didn’t even hear me come in. ❤️

Unexpected trip abroad 🇬🇷

Traveling halfway around the world is not something that I would chose to do during the current global climate, but when your dad isn’t well, and is over in Greece, you do what you have to.

A few weeks back Dad wasn’t feeling well so he went into the Hosptial in his home village in Greece. Well, a long story short, and 3+ weeks later, and with some pretty scary and bleak days behind him, he has finally gotten out of the Hosptial. With the current going’s on in the world, it has been difficult to figure out if we (my sister and I) would even be able to get to him. It turns out that Greece isn’t allowing Canadians into the country at all, and it took awhile for me to figure out if I could. Those first few days were desperately helpless.

After several calls to the embassy, and scouring the internet for information, it was confirmed that I, as a US Resident would be allowed. Then came the question of whether or not Greece would allow me to enter with my Canadian Passport. Articles and information online either wasn’t clear, or outdated. In this rapidly changing world, it was hard to be sure what to do. After I spoke directly to someone in the Athens airport, it was confirmed that I would be allowed to enter.

Good. Okay, but wait: You can enter Greece, but you cannot transit via any EU countries…oh but wait, yes you can go through a select few places like Poland or Russia…what? I was hesitant to book anything through those places because what if something changed and I got stuck there? Everything was so uncertain at that point and very frustrating for everyone. Finally, after more scouring I found out that Munich or Frankfurt were an option, and because the UK left the EU, Heathrow was an option as well, along with Istanbul. Progress was being made.

By now, Dad had been transported to the Hosptial in Athens and was seemingly slowly improving. This bought some time for the imposed 7 day quarantine to life as of May 3rd. It didn’t make much sense to go all the way to Athens to sit in a hotel and FaceTime him from there, when we could do that from here. Again, we waited for what seemed to be, a better time.

All during the start of 2020 and this Pandemic you would hear stories of people not being able to be with their loved ones while they were ill, or dying. These were horribly sad and tragic stories, and I had so much compassion for those people. I’m not going to lie, I had anger for the way things were being handled. It was inhumane and nonsensical. Now, my family and I were living out one of those stories.

The thought of dad being sick, scared, and without his family made my heart ache. We are so forever grateful for his lady friend, Antonia who was by his side and provided us with as many updates as possible. Her English is 100x better than my greek, but communication was limited and so we resorted to typing our messages in our native language and using google translate to help us out. It was a godsend. Even with that, however, it was difficult to truly know how he was doing. Our heads were spinning and so unsure of what to do, what we could do. We knew had to get eyes on him ASAP.

Finally, tomorrow I will board a plane and fly to Athens to see him. He’s out of the hospital and back in the village where I will hang out with him and make sure he’s good. After that, I will be sure he gets his ass on a flight back to Canada as soon as possible. He needs to be closer during this time of uncertainty.

It will be a long journey, but it will make everyone feel better once I’m there with him.

I will try to keep everyone in the loop on the daily. Hopefully everything with the travel goes smoothly and I get there without a hitch. I’ll keep you posted.