Where did I leave off? This journal entry covers our flights back to the US and our travel to Maine. We just wrapped up our two week quarantine in Maine. Yay! We flew from Athens via Frankfurt to Washington DC, spent a couple nights in DC, and then drove all day to Rockland Maine in a day. Other than the original flight from Greece being cancelled everything went ok, and knock on wood, we're healthy more than two weeks after all the flying.
We wouldn't recommend flying any time soon, though. The Aegean airlines flight from Athens to Frankfurt was packed. We both got window seats but almost every seat on the plane was full. They still serve some food and drink so people all take off their masks at the same time; seems like a terrible idea, right?! And people don't follow instructions for getting off the plane so most passengers still pile up in the aisle when exiting and there's no social distancing. Luckily for our longer flight to DC we each had 3 seats to ourselves--we splurged for economy plus on United--and we barely ate a thing and barely drank anything. In short we were plastered to our seats for about 9 hours. Our bladders were not happy. When we landed at Dulles we were still, like the old days, packed into the people movers (aka mobile 'lounges') to go be taken to passport control. We had to fill out some paperwork--have you been to China (why China--they're doing better than the US!), do you feel ok--then they took our temperatures and gave us some paperwork with a CDC number to call if we felt ill. We both noted that we were coming from a country that is doing light years better than the US and the CDC staffers agreed with us.
We rented a car and drove straight to meet Bella, Robert, and Kai, who had done some grocery shopping for us and even cooked us a welcome back dinner! We felt a bit like stray cats as Bella et al, and several other friends put out food for us but we were wary of approaching them and they had to cautiously keep their distance, too. So weird. We stayed a couple nights at Beth and Mike's place in DC and got over the jet lag. It was nice to be in their cosy home instead of a hotel. We also met with Irene, again in stray cat style, and she gave us some more groceries and a few of our old things (my beloved cast iron dutch oven!). DC had just lifted the curfew and the weekend we arrived was filled with peaceful protest. It was weird seeing so many windows boarded up, though. Sam took a photo as we drove through U Street on our way to meet Irene (below). After leaving DC, we stopped near Baltimore and Sam's pal Lisa very sweetly arranged to meet us really early (ok, so we weren't really over the jetlag--we left Mike and Beth's place at 500am) at a park for tea and homemade muffins. We spent stray cat-style time with her and then Sam drove us the rest of the tedious but uneventful way to Maine.
The next journal entry describes getting set up in Rockland.
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Wearing double masks! Glad to each have a row to ourselves on the flight from Frankfurt to DC
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Sam enjoys some outside time at Beth and Mike's abode
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Boarded up shops along U Street
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Lisa made us tea and muffins and spent a socially distant (very) early morning with us
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