As I write this, I am in the middle of a seven-day quarantine with my parents, who recently flew back to the island.
The lead-up over the past few weeks has felt like excellent prep work for visiting North Korea, should I ever choose to set my sights on the DMZ. And, let me clarify, that is in no way a dig at Travel Cayman. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I came across a more professional, pleasant group of people, who go out of their way to assist with queries, employing the kind of patience usually only found in kindergarten teachers.
It’s just that we’re living in a different world when it comes to travel. Three ounces of liquid in a Ziploc and ice picks in checked bags only seem like breezy regulations compared to the paperwork required since COVID came to town.
Part of the issue was my own family’s paranoia. You hear enough stories about people getting to airline check-in, only to discover that they didn’t have the right forms or approvals, to start worrying about scenarios before they happen. Would electronic versions of approvals be acceptable or were printouts mandatory? Did it matter which vaccine you’d had? Was getting to the British Airways desk five hours ahead of flight departure going be sufficient or should my parents spend the preceding night sleeping on the floor in front of the first kiosk in Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in order to be assured of making boarding time?
I felt fairly helpless, waiting halfway across the world for them, hoping we’d followed the processes correctly, so it was a relief when I saw them emerge from local immigration and customs into an eerily quiet Owen Roberts International Airport arrivals area. Save for some travel representatives in uniform and masks, carrying clipboards and large manila envelopes, there was barely anyone around. It was like a scene from one of those disaster movies, where the Statue of Liberty inevitably ends up underwater. Of course, there were still chickens happily roaming about near the taxi stands. Some things never change.
We got to my house, freshly braceleted and carrying an extra smartphone each, which we had been given by friendly Travel Cayman staff.
You know how most of us have mobile phones and tablets already in our lives? My home is no different. And now we had four more phones to add into the mix, with ownership rules that reminded me of ‘Gremlins’:
- Don’t let their power drop under 30%
- Keep your device with you at all times
- Don’t immerse in water
- When it beeps, tap the green bar to indicate that you haven’t flown the coop
All the devices looked the same in their protective cases, so the first thing I did was stick tape on the back of each one and write the relevant initials on it in permanent marker to avoid descension into alert chaos early in the proceedings.
Everyone went off to their respective bedrooms not long after, each carrying handfuls of electronics. Night One was officially checked off the calendar.
It’s interesting – I wasn’t particularly bothered about being unable to leave the house for just over a week. It is a completely detached building with a fenced-in backyard. Things could be much worse.
I’m not exactly what someone would call ‘outdoorsy’, so the idea of missing out on sports, sunbathing or a 12-mile hike through the island’s interior didn’t upset me in the least. I’ve got used to staying in most nights, watching TV, trying to do everything but colour my hair.
So, saying all of that, why did it immediately feel really weird to know I couldn’t go any further than the boundary of my property, even if I wanted to? It’s like everything else in life: As soon as you’re told you can’t have it, you want it. Unless it’s poisonous, or will inflict a lot of pain… okay, maybe it’s not like EVERYTHING else, but certainly most things.
As we’re going through this quarantining process, I’ve learned quite a lot about my skills and their subsequent limitations, and that the house is almost like a living entity in the daytime.
In anticipation of my parents being here, I did a Big Shop at multiple supermarkets. The fridge and cupboards were bursting by the time I was done. Actually, friends and family put away the groceries, as the extra hour I thought I would have at the house before heading to the airport to meet the flight got cruelly taken away when BA suddenly changed route to fly over Cuba – instead of around it – from Nassau. I flung meat, cheese, biscuits, coffee and more grapes than you’d find in all of Tuscany at the group standing in the kitchen. With a final yell that they had to be gone before I returned with the travellers, I was out the door.
Since that fateful day, I’ve offered my parental units microwave soup, an egg sandwich, an egg-and-bacon sandwich, eggs and bacon with sausage on a muffin, cereal, and delivery from restaurants. I had no idea I had such a lack of imagination when it came to food preparation. Some vegetables and potato had better be going in the oven soon, or my boring menu will be complete. More grapes, Dad?
I’ve also never been one for using the dishwasher. Best friend and housemate, Lynne, moved out for the week as she couldn’t quarantine due to work… at least that’s what she said. She’s the queen of stacking the dishwasher. I have no earthly clue; I wash crockery in the sink.
In Lynne’s absence, I decided I had to give it a whirl – otherwise, I was facing the perfect storm of endless egg meals that stuck to plates like glue and turned as hard as diamonds, and only one painstaking way to clean them.
The good news is that I didn’t break a single plate, even as I stuck them in higgledy-piggledy, wherever I could find a random space on the racks.
The bad news is that I pressed the buttons I thought were the right ones, but clearly something had detached somewhere, which sent water under the cupboards and over the kitchen floor. And, of course, quarantine = no plumber. I could hardly call Travel Cayman and beg for an exception under these circumstances.
“This is an emergency! If I can’t have a plumber come in to fix this, I’ll have to (GASP) wash dishes in the sink!”
“Yes, Miss Wheaton. We have thousands of people in quarantine and the borders opening in about a week, but we’ll drop everything to get that sorted for you.”
I’d be laughed off the phone.
Remember me talking about the house being like a living thing? I tell you, when you worry that you might miss a beep from your quarantine device (see: “… tap the green bar to indicate that you haven’t flown the coop”), and have visions of security showing up at your front door, ready to spirit you away to prison via the halls of justice, every noise makes you jump.
The laundry gave an ‘end-of-cycle’ beep on the second afternoon. My mother was halfway to her tracking device before I told her it was just the dryer.
When the coffeemaker chirped to let us know that the carafe was full, I was up like a flash, picking up phones at random to pinpoint the source, finally realising moments later that we were in the clear. Back to DEFCON 5.
The microwave announced that its timer was finished – soup for all! The toaster oven was ready to serve up hot muffins, alerting the world with a “PING!” We were surrounded by the endless beeps that cried “Wolf”. Maybe I wouldn’t cook anything ambitious after all, in case it set the smoke alarms off and put Mum in an early grave.
Four days in, we’re now becoming more familiar with the sounds of different machines, and calm is finally settling in. Three more days to go and hopefully we’ll be free to eat anything but eggs for a while.
In conclusion, I again need to clarify that Travel Cayman – through the weeks before our stint at Her Majesty’s Prison Wheaton and ever since we closed the front door and stuck a handwritten ‘QUARANTINE’ notice on it – has been nothing but brilliant. The staff have clearly been well trained to deal with people who worry needlessly for a living.
No, they were not mobilising the troops to get us because one of our phones dropped to 29% power, and no, they were not trying to keep me on the phone and distracted while said troops scuttled up my driveway with a battering ram.
Hats off to those folks in blue who are working around the clock to keep us safe. Now, if one of them could just fix my dishwasher.
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