Malaga, Spain
We made plans to meet our friends, Margaret and Con in Malaga today. They live in England, but they have a place near Malaga and they happened to be there when our shop would be in port.
This morning Ken woke up feeling sick. He took an antigen test (we brought several with us) and he was positive. I took one and I was negative. He took a different brand of antigen test. Still positive.
We contacted the ship’s Infectious Disease Officer. She sent a nurse to our room to give us PCR tests to confirm our diagnoses. It was no big surprise that Ken was positive again and I was negative again. We both will have to stay in our room for 6 days. If Ken tests negative on days 5 and 6, then we can go out.
But they consider today to be Day Zero, not Day One. Oh, no!
The ship is full. They have no empty rooms for me to quarantine in, so I have to share with Ken. It doesn’t seem right, but I don’t see any alternative. I have probably already been exposed, at any rate.
We brought Paxlovid with us, so Ken started taking it. The nurse brought up some antibiotics for Ken to take also. We also have some decongestants and other OTC items we brought with us, so we are in pretty good shape.
The room service people have been very accommodating. We can order from the room service menu or any of the dining room menus. And, of course, from the bar menu. We are not supposed to have our room cleaned “unless absolutely necessary,” but we may call housekeeping if we need anything.
We are going to see if I can avoid catching Covid from Ken. We are both going to wear our masks while in the room. We took turns eating breakfast so the other person could keep their mask on. Then we figured out that if Ken ate on the balcony and I ate in the room, we could eat at the same time.
We have a little couch in our room that has a fold-out bed inside it. Ken said he could sleep there. We got extra sheets and blankets for that bed from the cabin steward. The only way you can open it is if you move the desk chair and the table and push them up against the door to the balcony. It gives us just enough space. It took a while to figure out where to put the couch cushions. This reminds me of camping, for some reason.
The really bad part is if I get Covid, my Day Zero will be the day I test positive, so I can end up confined to the cabin for more than 6 days. Oh no!
Needless to say, we did not get to meet up with Margaret and Con. We did not get to have tapas. We did manage to wave at Margaret and Con from our balcony. They were pretty far away, but we saw each other.
We have a lot of movies-on-demand available to us in our room. Tonight we watched the first Downton Abbey movie. We saw it when it first came out, but we wanted to refresh our memories before watching the new Downton Abbey movie.
We made it through five weeks of travel before this happened. We got to see everything we wanted to see in Tuscany and Rome. We got to see some great places in Spain. We tried very hard to avoid Covid, but our turn finally came. (I will try to write a post about how we tried and succeeded in avoiding Covid up to this point.) It occurs to us, that a cruise ship is probably an okay place to be when you have Covid. I mean, room service.
Today’s color is hot pink — the color you don’t want to see on your antigen test.
Sorry to see this. But thank goodness for science - and room service.
ReplyDelete