Items

• 2022-06-01

  Covid Europe

  My family and I really like to travel, like a lot. We usually do a big vacation every year, and Covid-19 really threw a wrench in our annual plans (as it did to every single person alive). March of 2020, my family and I had traveled to Washington D.C. When we got back home to Utah, not even 24 hours later, Washington D.C. had shut down entirely. We felt lucky we got to go, but hopeful this shut down would only be two weeks. Fast forward two years, and we (again, like the rest of the world) were unable to go anywhere. My sister and I had gotten Covid-19 in November of 2020, and then the vaccines started to roll out. We had heard that if you were fully vaccinated, places were starting to slowly open for those individuals. We thought since we already had Covid-19, why not get vaccinated so we could travel? So, my mom, myself, and my sister all got vaccinated. Solely to travel. We are by no means 'anti-vaccination' people, actually quite the opposite. But we did have the normal hesitations of getting this vaccine just to such little prior research. Regardless, we got the vaccine. We started looking at places where we could go, from cruises to domestic travel to international. And then, the booster comes out. The rules are now that you have to have all three shots. And then, I get Covid-19 again in November of 2021, after having been fully vaccinated. Finally, we start to plan a Europe trip for the summer of 2022. Every plane, train, and automobile that would take us to and around Europe required a valid Covid-19 vaccination card. There were so many Covid-19 tests we had to take prior to departure from the US, then when we got to Europe, and then when we were getting ready to return home to the US. We had to fill out numerous forms verifying that we were not sick and had not been sick in the previous 14 days. While we were in Europe, the mask mandate had lifted for everywhere but Austria, but we didn't know that. We went to board an Austrian airlines flight without a mask, and we were then told we could not fly without a mask. We had to beg the flight attendant to give us one, as we didn't know (they were not nice about it). Keeping up with everyone's different rules and regulations and testing and forms definitely made our trip more difficult than it would be now.