Sneaking across the Atlantic

Readers of this blog will recall the Great Levanto Fiasco of 2020-21.  

A large birthday celebration, with thirty or so attendees, scheduled for May 2020 in Levanto, Italy, on the Ligurian coast.  Cancellation at the last moment, when Covid-19, like an evil deus ex machina, descended upon the scene.  Rescheduling of the event for May 2021 -- because surely no pandemic would still be raging about the world by that time.  Final cancellation early this year when that prediction proved all too faulty.  

Besides the big Levanto celebration, my sister and I and two or three others planned a small coda to the main event, a cooling-off period -- we joked -- to recover from all that fun.  We rented a house for one week on the shore of Lake Como, in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

We never canceled that rental, but postponed it even further until this September.  I suspected that by that time, world-wide immunization would have got the pandemic under control.

Lake Como still remains on tap.  The pandemic -- despite variant delta -- is increasingly under control in America and in much of Europe, although not elsewhere.  And more important, I and most others originally scheduled for Levanto have received both vaccination shots.

And so, eight weeks from now, barring some new disaster, I will fly to Rome where I'll stay for two nights, readjusting to Italy and renewing my love affair with its capital.  Then by train to Milan, where I'll meet my sister, our cousin, and maybe another couple.  (They are flying directly to Milan from San Francisco.)  We'll take a one hour train ride north to the town of Como, on the lake, and then a ferry ride to Menaggio, where we'll be just three miles (a taxi cab drive) from our rental.

I know.  One definition of insanity is making the same plans over and over and being confronted repeatedly by the same disaster.  But sanity is overrated.

I do have misgivings.  The delta variant is very contagious, and my Pfizer inoculations aren't one hundred percent effective.  Also, I will have reached the end of a six-month period since I received them, with conflicting reports on how effective they will remain without a booster.  But for  now, Italy is letting American tourists arrive without a Covid-19 test result and without a quarantine requirement -- so long as they come bearing a white CDC proof of vaccination card.  Who knows what the situation will be like next summer?  Grab a trip while you can is my possibly flawed instinct.

My other concern is more logistic.  The U.S. government requires a negative Covid-19 test performed within 72 hours of departure on a return trip to the States.  We'll be staying in a somewhat isolated area, and may have to devote much of one of our precious days locating and traveling to a pharmacy able to administer the test.  And of course if the test is positive ... well, I don't even want to think of the consequences, of how long I might have to stay somewhere in Italy until the disease ran its course.  

But at least I'm convinced that -- even if worst came to worst, and I tested positive -- my vaccination would ensure that I'd experience no serious symptoms.  The possibility of a positive testing does add a little stress to my preparations, but all good trips are stressful in some way or another.  Right?  The stress, once overcome, always makes for good stories once I'm back home.  

Not to mention, here on my blog.