The End of 2020

Thank heaven.  This year is finally drawing to a close.  What a nightmare!

Our September cruise was canceled, and not long after we went to all the work of booking several dozen shore excursions for the March, 2021 cruise, it too was canceled.  The election didn't turn out the way we would have liked, but at least the latest Illinois tax grab scheme failed at the polls.

We've ordered a new front door unit.  It'll be beautiful.  But the manufacturer is short-staffed due to Covid (oh, everything's due to Covid these days) so when it will arrive is anybody's guess.  The only way to know for certain would be to make a plan that can't be canceled without forfeiting a lot of money.  The door would be sure to show up, then, at the wrong time.  If it ever gets here, we'll post a picture. 

Optimistically, we have booked hotel rooms for two IMSA races next year and are still sitting on a couple of cruise bookings.  Christmas is behind us...hip, hip, hooray for Christmas Vacation!!  And here comes the New Year...auld lang syne.  The acquaintance we'd like to forget is that damn mask.

Cheers!!

July

Remember when this was a travel blog?  What travel?  We canceled our next plan to attend a race.  It just wasn't worth it.

The ice maker only cost an arm to repair.  The leg was, at least, spared.

The washing machine did its final jig across the laundry room floor, with Gordon in hot pursuit.  There came a string of artful profanity, followed by "get dressed, we're going to Home Depot!!".

The basil finally started to come into its own, but then the container had to be moved in preparation for the roofing people.  Our pet chipmunk promptly dug up half of it. The basil's recovering well at this point, as is the chipmunk.

Speaking of the roofing project, it began a week late.  During the first few days, it rained when a portion of our roof was not shingled.  An employee of the company came out at 9:30 at night and put a ladder up to check.  Someone called the police.  The work then proceeded at a glacial pace due to short staffing.  Result:  over three weeks of banging, hammering, and mariachi rap.

The Illinois State Department of Revinooers has returned to work, and the annual notice has indeed arrived.  We're leaving the plumbing alone for right now.

Ruminations

Well, so, here we are.  It's June of 2020.  Don't know what to think about the Coronavirus pandemic...the whole thing seems just a little over the top.  Too many opinions.  There are protests against the police in many cities that have turned into riots with hundreds of people looting businesses, but we can't go to an automobile race because there would be more than 10 people there.  Wait, what?

So far, June's not been so good to us.  Our trip to Road America for an Indycar race is canceled.  The icemaker in the fridge has gone kaput, the cable and internet went down, and we're worried about the washing machine.  Pati's drivers license has expired...the DMV just reopened and the line goes around the building twice.

Seems everyone decided to start a garden this year (nothing else to do) so we struggled to just find some basil seeds and they're not growing well.  There is a plan to put a new roof on our building at the end of the month.  Rate things are going, maybe that would be better done in July, along with some necessary plumbing repair, in hope of avoiding floods and shit storms.

It's probably good that we already had the heating and air conditioning replaced in April.  We need to have our insulation beefed up, but the insulation people aren't allowed to work.  Maybe we saw them on the news, carrying 85-inch flat screen TV's out of Target.

We had, at least, a cruise from Barcelona to Montreal in September to look forward to, beginning with a side trip to Milan for a race.  Just finished up the cruise prep and were looking at plane tickets for Milan when there came greetings from the cruise line.  So sorry, your cruise is canceled.

What really chaps us is that last February, we spent a whole morning scouting out laundromats in Barcelona so we could wash our damn underwear between adventures.

On the bright side, the federal and state income tax people must not be working.  We haven't gotten the annual notice that we did something wrong and owe more money.  Amazon Prime is running like clockwork.  Good thing, we need ice cube trays before 5 p.m.  Period.

Not So "Nice"

Saturday, March 21...With Nice completely shut down, one couldn't even take a walk down the promenade.  We took the long way to the grocery store, just to breathe the air and move around.  We stocked up on essentials, like wine, and holed up waiting for our departure on March 29, which still looked good.  The news was wall-to-wall coronavirus coverage.  No wonder everyone was freaked out.

Mozart upstairs was cutting us a break, and Stradavarius across the street was actually sounding pretty good by now, having caught up on his practice.  Every evening at eight, lots of the people on the block came out onto their balconies and we all gave each other a round of applause.  We felt like chipmunks, crawling out of our den to celebrate surviving another day.

At this point, the Wiener Dog Contest, like most other major sporting events, was canceled (by the sore loser) due to virus concerns.

Sunday, March 22...The airline canceled our flight from Nice to Copenhagen, offering no suggestions about reaching that city to catch the connection to Chicago.  Start looking online for a connection.  Can't reach the airline, it's Sunday.  Have some wine, applaud on the balcony.

Monday, March 23...Gordon sits on hold for an hour only to learn from the airline that there is no way to get to Copenhagen.  Skandinavian Airlines can't getcha to Skandinavia.  We decided that we'd better get the heck out of town before airports started shutting down and we became seriously stuck.  There were planes running from Europe to the US, just not so many and getting to their departure point (say, Frankfurt, Paris, London) was looking more and more difficult.

Pati searches frantically, finds a way out of the maze with a departure in less than two days.  We book it, Danno.  We start packing and applaud on the balcony.

Thursday, March 26...What was supposed to be one airline, two airports, and home in 15 hours became hours spent online, two airlines, four airports, a hotel night, several different ground transports, a grand or so, and home in about two days.

We flew through Madrid, and the number of idle aircraft at that airport was not to be believed.  Many had their engines covered up like they were ready to be mothballed, and were still sitting at the gate.  Here is the International terminal:

LaGuardia was like a ghost town.  In New York, there seemed to be little enthusiasm about working...but maybe that's not necessarily virus-related behavior.

Finally home, Pati said she felt like she'd been rudely uprooted like a mandrake.  Naperville is shut down just like Nice was.  But we were both still healthy...although we would have  probably tested positive.  Everyone else seemed to be.  Had a martini and remembered the balcony.

We want to acknowledge some people for their levity:  Declan, who didn't take the toilet paper crisis too seriously; Julie, who just wanted to go to Lidl; the Iberia agent at the Nice airport...with only a dozen passengers, she knew us all.  And the reservations agent at Flag Limo, who couldn't have really been having a real good day but was laughing anyway, and especially Christa, the flight attendant who "got the party started" with warm mixed nuts in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

Coronavirus Lockdown. March 19, 2020

And we complained about the strikes.  Here we sit, confined to quarters.  Can't get out of the country for 10 more days.  No one allowed out and about unless on the way to or from work (and that's not many) or the grocery store.  All shops and restaurants closed.  The street is eerily quiet, except for the violinist across the way.  Thank heaven "Mozart" upstairs is leaving the piano alone, but why is anyone's guess.

At the store, only a few people are allowed in at one time.  The dried pasta shelf is almost empty along with the pasta sauce shelf, and the canned goods department.  Toilet paper?  Nope.  None.

People are cleaning house to keep themselves busy...we can hear the vacuums and mops going.  Ah!  He's playing a Viennese waltz!  Others are wandering about on their balconies.  After all, it's 68 degrees and sunny.  What a day for the beach.

All went well until the Italians locked down Milan.  Nice countered by canceling the rest of Carnaval.    Then, a pause before the rapid changes.  EU borders closed, airline and train schedules disrupted, restaurants closed (every one that could go into the carryout business, did), the mall closed, Terminal 1 at the airport shut down, and finally the announcement that we're all grounded.

Oh, good God, there goes Mozart.

We've gotten into some pretty interesting situations on our travels.  This is one of them.  Best we can do is hope that the airline keeps flying cargo from Copenhagen to Chicago, with a few passengers on board, until we can get back to the States.  But, then, what awaits us there?  Fisticuffs at the Costco, a tanked stock market, elections on the horizon, the income taxes are still due, and we'd bet that there's no toilet paper.

Sorry, no pictures...

Nice 2020, Part 1

First, let us say that French strikes stink.  One of the first words you learn upon visiting France is "greve", which means "strike".  It's almost as important as "bonjour".  At the beginning of this trip, the unions were all up at arms about pension reform in France and had been since November.  This translated into one or two strikes each week, consisting of complete shutdowns of the transport systems.  No tram, no bus, no train, no get anywhere.  Plenty of traffic jams, though.  This went on until the proposed law went to the assembly.  In American terms, the bill went to the house for debate.  At that point, mid-February, all the strikes stopped, supposedly until March 31.  Good.  We could use a break.

So, on a non-strike day, we went over to Monaco to see the circus animals.  This year was Monaco's year of the horse, and there were plenty of them.

We skipped Rally this year.  We don't get enough coverage either here or in the states to know who's who anymore.  Don't worry, F1's coming up.  And speaking of which, off to Barcelona we went to watch the annual testing, with excellent weather.  Formula 1 has shortened the number of testing days, so there was plenty of track action.

And somehow, the new management has persuaded the teams that hiding behind the blinds in the garages was no longer to their liking, so the garages were open and visible most of the time.  One could even see the occasional driver!  Big improvement for the fans.

Back to Nice and it was Carnaval time.  This year's theme was "King of Fashion".  Lots and lots of Karl Lagerfeld.

We were excited when one news source stated that the burning of the King was moving back to the sea, to be accompanied by fireworks, like it was before the tragedy of July 2016.  Other sources did not support that, and the official program said nothing about any of it.  We were wondering whether to walk down to the water on March 1 to see what, if anything, was going to happen.  Our fine Mayor Estrosi (I mean that literally.  No joking.  This guy is great.) made up our minds for us by cancelling the rest of the festivities due to the Coronavirus fears.  Guess he wanted to keep any infected Italians on their side of the border.  In the end, the king was burned at Place Massena in an unusual situation, because the grandstands had already been taken down.  So what do you do with all the flowers when you have cancelled not one, but two Bataille des Fleurs (flower parades)?  Some went to the war memorials, some to the cemeteries, some to the hospitals, and the rest to the people on the street:

The city employees were having a blast distributing the mimosas.  We hear that next year's theme is King of Animals.  Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my.