The final payment for our July trip to Iceland is due this week. We have flights and hotels reserved, including visits to our son and my brother on our way home. There are a couple of days in Reykjavik before we get on a brand new Ponant ship, Le Bellot. And the tour operator says they’re planning to operate the trip. Iceland is even planning to ease restrictions on international travelers by mid-June.

We’re not going. Even if they get permission to sail, the flight from Portland to Reykjavik is currently not operating. It looks like the “eased restrictions” would give us the choice of proving we’re COVID-19-free on arrival or quarantining for 14 days (which is longer than the trip). And neither of us is ready to fly yet.

Luckily, the tour operator offered us the choice of moving our reservations to 2021 (or even 2022) at no penalty (in fact, they’ll give us a $300 credit) – it wasn’t a hard choice. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with the various airline tickets – we might get a refund from Icelandic if they don’t reinstate the flight from Portland before our scheduled departure, but all of our domestic flights are likely to operate, so we’ll have to settle for credits for those segments.

We’re still looking forward to seeing Iceland – just not yet.

Shabbat Shalom!

Last fall, we realized that our deck was showing some severe signs of wear, including a few boards that felt rather unsteady under our feet. Since we were replacing gates in our fence, we had the same company replace the bad boards – but the problem didn’t go away completely. The company, on the other hand, did – they said they’d come out to estimate the additional work, but it never happened (I guess it was too small a job).

We did have another vendor who we’d used a few years ago for re-staining the deck, so we called him – but he had decided to take the entire winter off, and by the time he was ready to open back up in the spring, COVID-19 had arrived. He did remain responsive by phone, though, and today, he came out to the house to give us an estimate.

It was strange to hear the doorbell ring, and to know that there was someone outside waiting to talk with me. He, of course, was masked and stayed far away; I told him to meet us in the backyard. And by “meet”, I meant “stay six feet away from us” – but that wasn’t a problem; we could communicate just fine at that distance.

A few minutes later, we had a plan and a deal; sometime in the next few weeks, I expect to have a re-stained and repaired deck. Progress!