Not Throwing Away My Shot
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Hauganes, Iceland, where there’s a hot tub in our front yard with a view of the fjord, and occasionally we see a whale swim by. Sadly, I haven’t yet seen one swim by while I’m in the hot tub, but it seems like a reasonable goal.
I Am Not Throwing Away My Shot (apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda, but I’ve been waiting to use that line since December)
We finally managed to get our shots! This tale, though, is not the one you’re expecting.
A few years back, we met up with some friends while we were all passing through Tokyo. At dinner, Doug asked which element of our lifestyle is the most stressful. Lee had an immediate answer.
“When we have to be somewhere on time.” He is the most punctual person I’ve ever known, and dinner that night had taken us across the city, on the Tokyo subway at rush hour. His gotta-be-early stress was fresh on his mind.
He was right, though—we almost never have to be anywhere at a particular time, but when we do, we’re usually pretty motivated. I am not, by nature, an obsessively punctual person, but I’ve gotten into the habit of deciding that we should be three (or more) hours early to the airport. Without a constant, daily schedule to follow, I’m better able to prioritize—be early for the things that matter, and don’t fret about the less important.
I’ve mentioned before that (pre-pandemic) we always go to the US in the spring to see our people and have all our medical appointments. One year we decided to go ahead and get the new shingles vaccine. Lee had already had the older variety, but I hadn’t, and the new one (Shingrix) is supposed to be much better. So we got the first dose at Duke. No problem—we’d just get the booster in our next destination.
Then we flew to Europe for the summer, and realized that getting the second dose was going to be a bit more complicated.
We’d been told to get the booster within a certain window after the first dose. The several-week window would open while we were in Latvia, so Lee started calling around. There was no Shingrix available in Latvia. It turned out Germany was the only country in the EU that had a reliable supply. We bought plane tickets for a day trip to Berlin.
The day before we were supposed to go, I had a heart arrhythmia that happens to me sometimes, but then it turned into atrial fibrillation, which has never happened before, and I wound up in an ambulance (Lee thought the ride was very exciting—I did not). At the hospital, my heart was shocked back to normal, but they insisted on keeping me overnight.
By the time I got back to our apartment the next morning, it was too late to fly to Berlin, and I was too exhausted anyway.
A couple of days later, we left Latvia. We’d already planned a short week in Lithuania, so that seemed like a bad time to try and go to Germany. Our next stop was Sicily, where we were staying in an apartment for a month, so we decided to go then. Lee went ahead and booked a flight. This time we planned to spend a couple of nights in Berlin, just to give us a little more cushion—we were now pushing up against the end of the second-dose window.
The day of our flight arrived. Rain was bucketing down, but we didn’t think much of it. Lee had a cold, so he took some Sudafed. On an empty stomach. A little while later he was throwing up.
The weather went from bad to worse. Our apartment faced the sea, on the tiny little island of Ortigia, which basically constitutes the ancient part of Siracusa. Rain lashed in from the Mediterranean, driving sideways against our French doors. As I was throwing the last few things in my overnight bag, I realized water was pouring into the living room, under the doors. I grabbed a mop and some towels (Lee was eating crackers at this point, trying to calm his stomach) and started trying to clean up the mess.
Then we started worrying about how we were going to get to the airport, which was an hour away in Catania. We had planned to walk to the bus station, which is a mile and a half away, in the newer part of the city. It was clearly too wet for that plan, so we’d have to take a taxi to the bus stop. The clock was ticking—we needed to get going. The only problem was that we had no idea how to get a taxi. They usually congregated by the bridge to the new city; very few cars ever ventured onto the island, and on that day, there were none.
Now we were well and truly starting to fear we wouldn’t make our flight. Or get our immunizations.
As a last resort, I had to go find a taxi. I headed out in shorts and flip flops, sloshing down the flooded stairs INSIDE our building. When I got outside, it seemed like I was stepping into a hurricane. Wind, rain, lightning, thunder. The water was well over my ankles; I was immediately drenched. In the old city, with buildings right up against the narrow, cobbled streets, there was nowhere to hide. I made it to the corner, and miraculously saw a taxi dropping someone off, just a few doors down.
We were running so late at that point that we decided to skip the bus entirely, and pay the driver to take us straight to the airport. It turned out to be one of the most expensive—and terrifying—taxi rides we’ve ever taken. The driver seemed a little manic. When we exited the car, shaken, Lee (who’d been able to see the speedometer the whole time) informed me that our speed had never dropped below 87 mph, even when the driver was texting. In that torrential rain.
But we made it to the airport in time to catch our flight. We got our Shingrix boosters. When we got back to Sicily, we found out that the flooding had set records—while I was getting soaked in the street, helicopters had been plucking whole families off rooftops.
As nomads who almost never have hard deadlines, we rarely have scheduling complications, but when we do, they’re often memorable.
From my writer’s notebook:
One good thing that came out of that delayed jaunt to Berlin was that I was able to visit the Gurlitt exhibit that had just opened at a Berlin museum (if you don’t know about the Gurlitt stash, check Wikipedia—it’s quite a story, and continues to unfold). The exhibit was the first to really explore the details of the Nazi art theft operation, with many paintings hung on mesh, so that visitors could examine the extensive provenance markings on the backs. The exhibit was so interesting, in fact, that I was almost late to our injection appointment. Oops.
Take care,
Lisa
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