Puerto Rico Bound

I will be taking the week off from the blog next week, as I’m heading to Puerto Rico on Sunday morning. PR was about as international as Denisa and I were willing to get at this point. We picked it because we thought it would be fairly easy to get there and back again. I’ve been surprised, however, at just how complicated the process has been. There’s a rule that everyone coming into the territory has to have a PCR molecular COVID test. These are more robust than the ones you can just drive over to the pharmacy to get. We had to make a special appointment at the hospital to get ours this morning, which could only be done by first getting a referral by our Primary Care Physicians. The test itself wasn’t too bad. Just a thin Q-tip up each nostril until they hit brain.

Assuming we’re both clean (and I expect we are, since we’re both fully vaccinated, and I just barely had my weekly COVID test at the university on Wednesday, which came back negative yesterday), then we have to go to a special Puerto Rican website, register, and upload our negative test results. This will in turn generate a QR code that we’ll be able to then scan when we get to San Juan, which will let us out of the airport.

(For those people who don’t get the test, they can pay fines of up to $300 and then take the test in San Juan, at which point they have to quarantine until the negative result comes back. Puerto Rico ain’t messing around. In addition, there’s an island-wide curfew of 10pm, all indoor business and restaurants are capped at 30% capacity, and I’m sure there are likely some other requirements I’ll discover when I get there and try to actually do anything.)

Still, vacation! I will be stepping away from most electronics as much as I can, with the exception of my revision of THE AXEMAN (now tentatively with a new title that I might share when I get back). That’s due at the beginning of June, and I’ve done the math, and I don’t have time to take a week off and stay sane in the last half of May. So sanity will have to win out over vacationing.

Try not to have too much fun while I’m gone!