Travel Day

Wednesday, April 1
   Today Isolde and Thomasina travel from UK to Italy. From Ramsgate, a remote little city at the mouth of the Thames, to Moiano, a tiny country village in Umbria. Normally this is a routine day's journey rehearsed many times, usually via cut-rate airline RyanAir from Stansted airport to Perugia/Assisi where we pick them up. Not this time.
    This time a virus is killing people in the thousands and everybody is locked down hard in their homes, if they have them. There's no cure. There's barely care. If you get the virus you ride it out. Or not. Keep warm, drink plenty of liquids and, yeah. That's it. No one with any authority listened to the science so now we get to hide under the covers. It's sort of a gruesome prelude to climate crisis, or the nuclear arms crisis, or the fresh water crisis, or the plastic crisis, or the teflon crisis, or the inequality crisis, or the balance of payments crisis, or the toilet roll crisis. Maybe a powerful automatic weapon, some ammo and a little range time is a good idea. 
     But I'm wandering off topic. We still live in a civilized country. It's deep in debt, I know, and the government replaces itself so fast there's little consistency; but there's still enough oxygen in the air to keep the trains running. But not the airlines. Ours went bust while we were in Egypt. Since then Alitalia has gone. And RyanAir has parked it's entire fleet. Boeing is on a Trump ventilator. And if you're still holding airline stock, it's probably too late. But no! Alitalia has re-emerged! It's now a wing of the Italian government and the taxpayers (roughly half the population) have ponied up for a few "repatriation" flights for those Italian residents who, sensibly up till now, reside elsewhere. That's what Alex spotted and that's what we purchased for Isolde and Thomasina to escape the collapsing UK to their already collapsed home of Italy.
      These airline tickets were purchased a month ago when things were getting pretty grim. Italy imposed lockdown on all citizens and we had to carry an autodichiarazione describing why, exactly, we had to visit the grocery store. That was pretty serious because groceries and drugs were all that anyone could buy. Forget the flower shop. Need a pane of glass for that broken window? A bit of tar for that leaky roof? A cork for that broken pipe? Not today. Call the landlord? He's not answering. He's not allowed to answer. And if you need a cup of coffee, you've got to make it yourself. As the days went by, the bodies piled up, the people started taking it seriously and began to sing from the balconies. As it became clear that nobody was going to solve this crisis, the lockdown became more and more severe. And it was good. We began to consume less. The air cleared, the water cleared, the traffic cleared, the sun rose, the spring bloomed, the birds returned, and money stopped flowing. But so did people. Flying from one country to another got harder and harder. You had to prove stuff. Who were you? Where, really, do you live? What are you doing? Are you ill? Do you really need to travel? And if you do, how are you going to get there? Suppose you are allowed to land and enter Italy, how are you going to go anywhere if you are quarantined for 14 days? At one moment it was decided that no one could cross from Umbria to Lazio just to pick up someone from the airport. They would have to reside at the airport until public transportation could be arranged. Then, a few days later, that didn't sound so smart. Yes, you could pick up someone from the airport in your own car as long as you sat as far apart as you could in your Cinquecento. But only two people per car. Phone calls to the various authorities usually ended up in infinite wait times or simply timeouts. Nobody had any authority and nobody wanted it.
    Now, at the very last minute, we have the assurance that if one driver travels with a vegetable crate full of docuements printed off the internet, one may drive from Umbria to Lazio and thus to Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci to receive gloved, masked, repatriated, close relatives providing they carry sufficient documentation and have managed to survive the rigors of biological screening and security controls. With this elevated level of confidence, Alex set off about an hour ago for the rome airport. We are, of course, breaking the law in a variety of ways, but we are used to that. There will be three in a car. The girls will travel on UK passports. And it's doubtful anyone will believe our promise of a suitable quarantine location or time period, especially with an english accent. But this is Italy and not UK, (or, can you imagine? US). The Italian authorities are still people, unlike their contemporaries in either the UK or US. If you have a perfectly logical, normal, human explanation for why a family might have two female children in school in another country at the same time and that they might be wanting to come home on the same flight and travel in the same car as their mother to a safe, empty house for the required quarantine period; those excuses will fly here in Italy.
     And that's why we live here.  

Thursday, April 2
     Yes. The answer is yes. They did make it to Italy and they did make it to LeCoste and it all went well. So well, in fact, that I don't have a good story to tell. 
    I haven't seen them yet and it could all be a communist plot, but Alex swears it all went extremely well. Like clockwork. Like, yeah, I'm sure. Come on. What about the fake masks and the fudged documents? If Isolde and Thomasina are really sleeping in a cold, empty house ten minutes up the hill, there's got to be a story.
    I returned with the car facing a frantic Alex saying that they are about to take off! What? Well, they got to Heathrow early and hitched a ride on an earlier flight. I had been making up the beds with electric blankets and splitting wood into kindling to try and encourage the kind of warmth they had become used to in their virus infected hotel in Ramsgate. Actually, that's not fair at all. The Ramsgate hotel was infested with hypochondriacs, not Covid 19s. Everyone suffered with every symptom of the virus but none actually required any immediate ventilation. Except for their opinions. The Ramsgate hotel, compared to the nation of Italy, remains one of the world's safe havens.

    Airport taxi scrambled! Document package stuffed. Sandwiches washed with soap and water. WhatsApp messages encrypted. Gas station gloves? Check! Painter's mask? Check! Seatbelt? Check! Mirrors? Check. Social distancing seating plan? Check! Go! GO!
    And in the next moment, I stood there, quiet, alone, wondering what just happened? The sun is out, birds, the cat, bugs, weeds, hunger, silence. What do I do now? I should have been the driver. I know the way. I'm the man. But my one-year-old driver's license doesn't, technically, allow me to drive our car. It's too powerful for me. So Alex is the driver. And I'm left standing here, wondering. What if? I mean, What if no one returns. What if they are all carted off to quarantine somewhere? That would happen in Uk or US. That is my mindset. I'm not counting on the government officials to "bend" in case there is a problem.

   But, of course, they do; and our girls are waved through much more easily than their grilling at Heathrow. They are believed. Unlike UK where their stories are suspected, their stories jibe, they are believed.