Anticipation

 

Anticipation

September 30, 2021

 Finally!  We returned home from Ethiopia at the end of January 2020, and except for a short stay at an Air B&B on the North Carolina coast in the spring of 2021, we have not traveled.  We are fully vaccinated (with three Pfizer doses) and on October 5 we leave for Italy and France.  We’ll be in Europe until October 27, visiting parts of Italy and France which are new to us.

We have completed our EU Digital Passenger Locator Form and received back the confirmation with the QR code which is part of getting into the EU through Italy. 

 


We have also completed the “Demande de conversion d’un certificate de vaccination étranger en passe sanitaire francais (étrangers)” but have not received our EU vaccination passports yet.  We completed those on September 3, and if we don’t get them, we may have trouble in France getting into restaurants, galleries, etc.  Their web site says they’re taking 17 days to process, so I hope they arrive soon.  We are scheduled for our COVID-19 tests on Sunday, October 5, as those must be done no more than 72 hours before our arrival in Italy.

We’ll fly to Milan.  We had a great itinerary Rochester-JFK-Milan on Delta, and then Delta cancelled their mid-afternoon flight from Rochester to JFK.  Our choice was a 6:00 AM flight to JFK and sit there all day, or a three-leg trip at 1:00 PM, Rochester-Detroit-JFK-Milan.  We’ll get to JFK through Detroit.  Ugh.  Our Italy trip is with Smithsonian to the Lake district, and we’ll use Stresa on Lake Maggiore for a base while we study there and take day trips.

Following our stay in Stresa, we’ll fly Milan-Paris-Bordeaux, where we’ll be on our own for a couple of days, and then will meet up with a Road Scholar trip which will take us to Bordeaux, Sarlat, Rocamadour and will finish in Toulouse.  It’s a great itinerary, and there will be lots of wine sampling, too.

So we’re looking forward to traveling again!  The hassles because of COVID-19 are simply hassles, and we so anticipate enjoying Italy and France, good food and wine.

Updates when there’s something to tell.

Comments

  1. Ralph P. LockeOctober 7, 2021 at 4:57 PM

    Poulenc wrote a choral piece about the Black Madonna of Rocamadour (Litanies a la vierge noire de Rocamadour). That's my one association with the various towns and cities you name (except of course for Bordeaux).

    ReplyDelete

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