Moving the Clink: Misinformation meets Disinformation

 So, I woke up early on the last morning. Watched as the Regal Princess gently cruised into dock one last time. I love watching that. Never gets old. I ordered up one last flat white and just sat there quietly sipping. I will miss life at sea.

As the 8-9 am time range got close, my brain apparently died. I knew this was the time they would move the clink, but I was still unclear what I was supposed to do…being not in the clink. I decided to go ahead and clear out of my room at 8, because the paperwork that came to the regular rooms asked that we do that. I only had my backpack and one other small tote bag, so this was no big deal. I thought I’d go sit by the gangway, maybe have a breakfast cocktail, and wait until I saw Jason and then jump up and join him. 

This was going smoothly until Jason asked me if I was supposed to stay in my room. I was like I don’t know. He said they told you to. I said…they did? 

So, I was pulling up Crew Chat to ask if anyone knew or cared where I was when all the sudden, here comes Wendy and a boat officer! She said, “What are you doing?” I laughed. “Clearly, I have no idea what I’m doing!” She said, “Why did you leave without saying goodbye?” Awww.

Turns out, I was supposed to wait. Anyway, the officer took me to the clink and dropped me off with Jason. I mean, why not? I got to hug Wendy goodbye first and thank her for taking such great care of us.

Now together in the clink, we were doing what you always do, which is to say we were watching Bull and feeling despair. I thought about ordering that breakfast cocktail but I kept thinking they’d come get us any minute.

Around 9:15, we finally get a knock on the door. There are two dudes and a luggage cart. They cram all our stuff on the cart and take off walking fast. Finally one looks back at us, still standing in our doorway. Come on, he says with just a wave. 

Alright then.

We continue walking very quickly. It’s like they didn’t want any germs to fall off so the plan was GET OUT FAST. When we got to the main elevator area, there was an officer or crew member standing all around to make sure no healthy passenger who might still accidentally be on the boat could possibly interact with us. Not a bad idea!

Turns out there is a separate gangway for the sickos. Also not a bad idea. Had I continued to sit at the gangway on 6, I never would have seen Jason walk off. We very unceremoniously walked off. I stopped for a moment to look back and take a quick picture. It wasn’t a great picture, but I still wanted to capture the moment for some reason. Maybe it just didn’t feel right to rush right off leaving behind 36 days of insane memories without…any notice of it.

Once inside the terminal building, the most interesting thing happened. We were in a very large room with nothing in it except the clink people. They wheeled in the luggage cart- immediately inside the doors- unpacked it and left us standing there with everything. Ok. What now?

We assessed the situation. Everyone else was standing or sitting there with all their stuff. No one was moving or talking. The terminal of despair meets the clink. Good times. 

And then, just when you think things can’t get crazier - everything just went absolutely nuts. I’d say we’d been standing around for 30 minutes or so with literally no idea what was supposed to be happening when this lovely lady with a very unfortunately quiet voice attempted to address the giant terminal clink room.

“Hello,” she whispered to all of us and none of us at the same time. 

“Hello,” she tried again. This time sort of waving one hand in everyone’s general direction.

“Please come close and gather around.” 

Um, what?

Some random, very angry man yells, “We aren’t supposed to be close together.”

“Well, I don’t want to yell.”

There you have it. 

We all move in.

The first bomb drops.

“I am here to take you to the hotel. In the last couple of days, Spain has moved from pandemic to endemic. This means you don’t have to quarantine.”

What?

“The hotel doesn’t know that you have COVID. Please don’t tell them.”

Wait. What now? What happened to everything we’d been told about quarantining in the hotel, the doctor coming daily to test, the family advocate person that is supposed to check on us every day?

Now it’s her turn. “What? I don’t know about any of that.”

What?

I cannot express to you with all the words in all the languages I know the shock and awe and confusion going on. 

On the one hand - wait. We don’t have to be quarantined? We can…go and do whatever we want?

On the other hand- what do you mean you don’t know about any of the stuff we were told was going to happen?

This poor lady. Her entire job was just to get us to the hotels. But I’ll tell you one thing right now, if you think a large group of bitter and angry old people are going to handle this total lack of communication and mixed messaging well…you would be very wrong. 

As they say, the shit was hitting the fan.

So, people start yelling out things. Questions. Random “facts”. Things they’ve heard. I mean, it was a disaster. The poor lady pretty quickly realized this was not going to end well and called…someone. I really wonder who. People started doing the thing they do where they don’t care that 50 other people just want to go to the hotel, they are going to hold everyone up while they ask an extremely specific question to the very wrong person. Does the lady who just needs to get us on a bus to the hotel know about your letter from your doctor? I’ll bet you ALL THE MONEY IN THE WHOLE WORLD she does not. And, she will not. Also, would you please just be quiet and let us move on? No. No, they will not be quiet.

The cool people pretty quickly found each other. There were like…5 of us. Two were a younger couple from Washington State. And guess what? Her dad was the guy directing traffic in the hallway outside the medical center that I met when I went to get my paperwork. Ha! Full circle again!

Finally, we were able to move forward with going to the hotel. Our beleaguered lady says, “I need 30 people on the first bus.”

Lady. You are killing me. You’ve clearly never tried to move large amounts of people. This is a science. I happen to excel at it which is English for me feeling exceedingly judgemental. 

Finally she decided to call out the names of 15 couples. Aha! Brilliant! But then the humans decided to human and we were stuck again. She called this one couple and they didn’t want to go on that bus. They wanted to stay till the second bus because they wanted to go with their friends. I mean - are you serious right now? This is literally a 4 minute ride. But, our lady was like ok fine. And then, inexplicably, about one minute later the declining couple decided they were going on that bus and so were their friends. So they all got up to get in line. Never mind that additional people had already been called. Which meant there were not enough seats on the bus now.

We stood in the back watching this and thinking, “Man, this just keeps getting better.” It always pays to stay chill and not be in a hurry.

Oh, and I forgot this gem- the people who changed their minds and went ahead to get on the bus anyway couldn’t carry their own luggage. They walked up to poor lady person and were like, “Who is going to carry our luggage?” She said, “You are.” Wrong answer. Oh, they were mad. Stomped off yelling. I realize they packed more than they could carry, but this poor lady is not a luggage porter. It’s really not her fault or her problem. 

So, we finally get on our bus. There were only 10 of us on it. We drive the amazing 4 minutes to the hotel and everyone gets off and gathers their luggage. As we start to walk in, a nice guy from the first bus lets us know that there are something like 50 people in line to check in so we might as well get comfy and wait a bit. Fine with us. We’re tired of being near this rude and cranky crowd. 

We took turns manning the luggage (Chilean pickpockets!) and wandering off to see what was around. There was a little coffee shop right next door that looked cool but we had no idea if it was open. This is something that seems normal in Europe. No hours posted. No way to really just look at it and tell. It’s confusing!

Finally, the line moved enough that we got in and before too long we had checked in and dropped our bags off. No rooms would be ready till 3. It was around noon at that point. I was really regretting that I hadn’t eaten breakfast or taken a shower. This is not how I thought the day would go. I actually thought Princess would have handled everything at the hotel and someone would just hand us our keys and we’d walk right into our quarantine rooms. Instead, we were unleashed in Barcelona with hours to kill and lots of COVID to spread. Good times.

We wandered around looking for a restaurant that wasn’t crowded because Jason was really worried about giving anyone COVID. We found one and got a table with lots of distance and got some food ordered. It was nice being able to just sit and linger there. We got back to the hotel around 4 and went to get our keys and our room still wasn’t ready. Man. We kept our spirits up and stayed gracious which was such a joy to the front desk clerk that she gave us free drink coupons for the bar. Score! So, we wandered up to the bar and had a great glass of rose while we continued to wait.

Finally, we were in our room. I’m guessing it was 5 by then. Remember how the day began…with me up early watching the boat dock. I felt like I’d lived an entire lifetime in those 12 hours. 

Now, we were told when we booked the cruise that if we got sick or tested positive, Princess would handle everything and pay for everything. This was the comfort we needed to book. We’d already learned they weren’t necessarily handling everything- at least not that we could tell. And now we were starting to be curious about the payment. They said they would pay for the quarantine hotel. Cool. Except we have to pay for it first and then submit for reimbursement. Thankfully, we can do this. But, what if we couldn't? What if our resources were tapped? What if we didn’t have a credit card to place a 10 day hotel stay on? I asked that question to guest services. He said, ‘I don’t know what to say.” Um. Ok. 

So, we’re currently being told that Princess will reimburse us for the hotel and give each of us $100 euros in a per diem for food. Possibly they will cover other expenses, too, like things needed at the pharmacy, rides to the airport, etc. I certainly hope this is true because I know a lot of really pissed off people.

Jason reached out to the family advocate person as soon as we got in the room. It’s disconcerting that no one seems to be aware of what Princess told us. We really just wanted to verify that the doctor was coming to test everyone every day. Turns out, no. No he is not. No one knew about this at all. Jason pressed it a bit and our ‘advocate’ let us know that she would get back to us Tuesday (we asked on Saturday) because of Easter Sunday and Easter Monday. I didn’t know there was an Easter Monday, but there is here. We said ok but we need that test on Tuesday so we know if we can fly on Wednesday. Spoiler alert. It’s Tuesday now as I type this. 4:30 PM. No one has tested anyone and no one has replied. I’m not sure our advocate is earning her title.

Meantime, we bought some rapid tests at the local pharmacy and have been testing Jason daily. These aren’t good enough tests for the airline to accept, but we figure as soon as he flips to negative, we will take a good test. Those are much more expensive so we don’t want to take those daily. 

Now, most of the mad clink people are in our hotel. Not all- they had to spread the joy around a little. But we keep running into them. I’d be perfectly fine for us to ignore each other. At a bare minimum, I’d be GREAT with not walking up to each other and loudly discussing how everyone has COVID. But can we live like this? We cannot. There are 2 couples in particular…when I see them I keep trying to somehow fall into the earth. It hasn’t worked yet. They stroll up, “HOW’S IT GOING/ STILL TESTING POSITIVE?” while not wearing their masks…and while they themselves are still testing positive. Hey, why not just get on the loud speaker and inform everyone in Barcelona that we have a contagious virus?

Listen, I get that people are tired of COVID and tired of masks and all that. I am, too. But when you know you actively have it, I just can’t see not trying to take a precaution to help others. Just like you would any time you are sick with anything. 

You cannot believe the things we’ve seen.

• People who 100% have COVID removing their masks to sneeze. 

• People sneezing without covering their mouths at all

• One man removed his mask, sneezed into the open, and then yelled out, “You know what they say, if you’ve got it, spread it!” I wanted to punch him in the face then and I honestly think that’s about the time I got COVID (the timing fits) so now I REALLY want to punch him.

• People with COVID who wander around with no masks or not trying to even avoid being close to people. No effort at all. 

• People removing their masks to cough - and turning TOWARDS people while they cough. A lady did that to me yesterday. I know she has COVID because she was in the clink. She turned toward me, removed her mask, and violently coughed. I glared at her while taking very large steps backwards.

• I don’t even care what you believe anymore. I don’t care what you are tired of. I don’t care how you feel- whether you are sick or have symptoms. All I care about is your ability to not just be a flaming jerk wad.

The rumor mill continues to go crazy. No one knows the same things. There is no consistent message. Princess seems to have sailed off and that’s just it. It’s very disappointing and confusing. Did they mean the things they said but just didn’t quite have it all figured out? We keep saying they had 2 years to plan for this. When they started working the plan, it was clear early on it wasn’t working. Was there no plan B? Was there no person nominated to decide when to move to plan B? Was there no communication plan? Hard to say.

So, with Spain treating COVID as an endemic, we are all free to go and do whatever we’d like and most people are actually feeling pretty good. The worst of it seems to be feeling like you’ve got a head cold, which you treat with a decongestant and then you get the dry cough. That’s not awesome, but we’ve all dealt with that type of thing our entire lives. It’s fine.

Meantime, Covid continues to take more prisoners. Seems like in all our friends, at least 1 person in the couple currently is testing positive. This is creating a lot of interesting decision points. Should the person testing negative go ahead and take the flight home? If not and they stay, they might flip to positive and then further extend the time they both have to stay here before the airlines will allow them to travel again. If one goes home, the other is left to fend for themselves. That’s really crappy and lonely. There’s no real good answer here. Right now, we’ve got friends who have decided both ways and we’re all just looking out for each other. 

Jason hit his important day 6 for testing yesterday. A negative would allow us to make our regularly scheduled flight home. He was still positive. 

Poop.

But, it’s not all bad. We’re making the best of it. We’re meeting up for meals and happy hour. Sharing walks to the pharmacy. Renaming the patio to “Vines” so we can pretend to be on the ship- knowing James is out there somewhere making the good drinks. It’s supposed to rain all day today and tomorrow and then a reprieve on Friday, so if everyone continues to feel better we are going to take a trip up to see Montserrat. That’s giving us all something to look forward to! We might still ride the hop on hop off bus today or tomorrow- we’ll sit in the inside/covered area to stay away from people and to stay dry.