💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202309 › 20230904-vacation-canceled.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:52:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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My wife and I planned to go out of town this week. We were to travel with another couple, good friends of ours that we've known for many years. We were to take an early flight this morning, and they live much close to the airport than we do, so we arranged to stay at their house last night in order to cut down on driving time. We met up with them the two of them and the husband's parents, had dinner, and got ready to retire for the evening.
Ten minutes a later, a knock on the bedroom door. The wife received a message from one of her coworkers informing her that the person had tested positive for COVID-19. She'd been suffering from a stuffy nose and fatigue herself, so she took a home rapid test. The result was clear and immediate: positive. Of course the rest of us had been exposed to her for several hours by now, so we had to cancel the entire trip.
The news was was massive disappointment. We'd all been looking forward to this vacation for months. Work has been quite stressful for all of us, and we'd hoped we could find a respite on the trip. Instead, the rest of us will be returning to our work-from-home jobs in order to bank our PTO time.
Fortunately, the company that sold us our trip package was extremely flexible. Almost everything was refunded to us, and anything not refundable was transferable to another date of our choice. We received vouchers for our airline tickets, and we were even refunded for our our transportation arrangements. Having the money back will be useful. But at the end of it all, we're still not on vacation.
There are some bright sides to the situation. We have more immediate uses for the money we'll be getting back. We still have today, a holiday in the United States, as a rest day. It's likely we'll be able to reschedule to just a few months from now, so our delay will not last long. But it's still frustrating to be so close to a vacation, and yet be so far away.
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[Last updated: 2023-09-04]