I’m late, I’m late….

for a very important date …. don’t let this happen to you …

In these new travel times dates are so important and so complicated, the most important date being the date of your negative covid test. Some countries say 2 days before, some say 3 and there are even those who say 4 days but working through this math can be challenging.

Just recently a client told us of a friend going to Bahamas who was denied boarding because their covid test was one hour outside of the allowed maximum. Because it was a charter destination they had to wait a week and spend $3000 on accommodation. Oh my goodness, what a horror story.

Now before we go any further I want to just get it out there into the public domain that math is not my strong point. In fact so much so that my staff here nicknamed me Lesley “Mathematician” Keyter. Cheeky buggers! What makes matters worse is that every destination is different with the time line. It means sitting with a calendar and plotting out the days and deciding which day is a good one for the negative covid test taking into account most labs say results in 24 hours …. but don’t guarantee it. Can life get any more complicated?

In fact sometimes in today’s world I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. I must have been on some strange medicine – maybe I will just wake up and discover that this was all a horrible hallucination. It made me think especially when I came across this article –

 “we come up to understand that Little Alice suffers from Hallucinations and Personality Disorders, the White Rabbit from General Anxiety Disorder “I’m late”, the Cheshire Cat is schizophrenic, as he disappears and reappears distorting reality around him and subsequently driving other characters in the story to madness. the Queen of Hearts is affected by egotism and narcissist syndrome “head off”, the hookah-smoking Caterpillar by drug addiction, and the Mad Hatter, simply by madness, repeating in an obsessive-compulsive way, for ten years at 6 p.m. the celebration of our beloved Unbirthday. But he is stuck there… no sense of time, while he is getting old.” From this article https://www.medicinanarrativa.eu/so-much-inside-alice-wonderland-for-medical-humanities

So now what you have to think about is when to get your covid test, what type of covid test to get, when will you get your results …. maybe you do need a few mushrooms to get travel organised properly – or maybe you just need a good travel agent! 🙂

Before the kind of questions and issues we dealt with were more along the lines of what sort of view does the hotel room have or will we definitely have a king size bed. Now that all seems to be pushed to the sidelines as the main question is how do I do this?

Not to be mean, but we have had an awful lot of people phoning in with questions about their travel plans which they have already booked themselves. They get kinda irked when we say that we can’t advise on that because we didn’t book it – which is absolutely true in terms of our liabilities and insurance. But is it just me or is that kind of cheeky? It would be like walking into your hair stylist and asking which hair dye you should by from Shoppers!

My goodness – was that my inside voice speaking out? I sound a bit bad tempered – maybe I should rename myself Queen of Hearts (keeping with the Alice in Wonderland theme) – as per wiki –

The Queen of Hearts is a fictional character from the 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. She is a childish, foul-tempered monarch whom Carroll himself describes as “a blind fury”, and who is quick to give death sentences at the slightest offense.

Just look at that face! No – I have changed my mind. I think I would rather be the caterpillar – he looks really cool and zoned out!

Do you think she was asking him if she needed a negative covid test to go to Never Never Land?