Shame about the polar bears, but they’ll be there when you can go again. Unless the Earth heats up really quickly and destroys all their habitat in the meantime. Oh.

Aye, these cancellations are getting a little tedious and every time we think there’s light at the end of the tunnel our government over here does something stupid to prolong the agony, with the latest likely course of action in a few weeks being to simply open everything up and dispense with all restrictions anyway, not caring what impact that has on anyone who’d actually like to travel when other more sensible countries slam the brakes on us getting there.

We had that week in Kos in November (and the mask restrictions on flights etc. weren’t ideal but we didn’t mind them too much) but that’s been our only time out of the country in over 20 months now and we’re really missing being at sea. Stress has got so much for Marie with her work (four people quit in four months in her department) that she’s literally getting signed off work as of today; her blood pressure’s a cause for concern, although not super-high, apparently, and her doctor has seen so much of it over the last year and a half that they’re taking no chances. It’s all having a toll on everyone.

I hope your rearranged cruises go ahead, and I hope ours do too, of course, even though we’re not doing anything as fancy as you. We are hoping that by keeping ours small and local(ish) for the next year’s planned trips we can reduce the risk of more cancellations, but I’m trying to be as reasonable as I can with it all as there’s not a thing we can do about it, plus I’m trying not to stress Marie out any more than necessary.

Lindblad, Nat Geo’s cruise company, is requiring that all guests be fully-vaccinated and have a negative PCR test prior to boarding. The test has to be within 48 h of boarding, I think, which is only sensible, given all the variants now circulating. Iceland requires vaccination also. We just got back from 5 days in Puerto Rico, which was my first time flying and traveling since the pandemic started. It was great to finally be traveling again, but the experience still felt…strange. Different. Things are not the same. There’s no more food or liquor sampling, which I particularly missed in Duty Free coming back. They are enforcing strict per person limits in many restaurants and stores, so there were lines to just get into a store to shop. Everybody is masked up all the time indoors, of course, which makes for very thirsty touring. Masking up during our flights also made us very thirsty, as we could only remove our masks briefly to take a sip or a bite, which complicates eating and drinking. Hotels aren’t providing gratis notepads, pens, or snacks anymore; and we couldn’t serve ourselves from the breakfast buffet. We had to get a server to fill our plates. These are all minor in the grand scheme of things, but it makes me wonder what our upcoming experience in August will be like.

We have two cruises already booked with Lindblad for 2022, and we have that cruise credit with Crystal cruises we have to use up by 2023. We are not booking any more cruises until we see what covid will do; we plan to book private land tours instead. They are more expensive, but the chances that they will be canceled are much less, in our estimation. Covid has really killed the cruise industry. As much as we love cruising, we can’t keep taking the kicks to the gut that all of these fucking cancellations are delivering.