Of Travel Are Spun

 

We’re gonna have our second vaccine shot this week.  The kids will have theirs early next month.  And with that we may still pose a risk to the non-vaccinated but, barring evolutionary variants and off-chance extremes of bad luck, we should be beyond the clutches of the virus.  Musing on this general theme my mind goes, inevitably back to the well-decorated room in my mind that’s been vacant for nearly two years now, where fantasies of travel are spun and cultivated. 

The practical thing would be to head back to China. The topic of wistful conversation at every other dinner we’ve had this year, my younger one is terribly homesick.  Everyone is, on some level.  We haven’t seen our son, their brother and his wife for the longest stretch we’ve ever endured.  I have plenty of business I could attend to and people and practical matters aside we all want to eat lots of Chinese food, over and over and over again. 

And, the motherland doesn’t seem to be impressed, at this point, with our U.S. vaccine, any more than the U.S. is with the Sinovac variety.  And even I they were, we’d still need to sit out the first two weeks in a state mandated hotel and who knows what, (probably nothing) would await us when we return back home.  China remains impractical, I tell myself, till at least the Fall.  Though I’m pretty sure that’s what I told myself last fall, as well. 

 

The Caribbean however, seems more welcoming.  And while I had considered placating the girls with a few days in some resort somewhere, perhaps Martinique where the younger one could practice French, she countered that we should go from island to island on a boat.  Now that’s a great idea.  I spoke with a colleague who hails from Martinique and he suggested that such a thing could be done for not much money.  I bought the Lonely Planet Caribbean and today it came.  We’d better go in June or forget about it till Thanksgiving if we don’t want to hit the dreaded Hurricane season.  All the remarkable islands of the Eastern Caribbean that I’ve taught students from St. Vincent and had colleagues from, Barbados could be visited one-by-one with little three hour sails from one island to the next.  My wife wasn’t enthusiastic, until I told her that the little one had thought of it.  She had to chew on it for a while, once that was made clear. 

 

 

 

Thursday 4/22/21