I’m sitting in a hotel room in Adelaide right now. I’ll have to stay here for another couple of days. I got my nose raped by a cotton swab just a few hours ago. Life is good.
I decided to leave Brisbane on Thursday and I booked my flight that morning. My plan was to fly into Adelaide on Friday, stay around for a few days to check things out, and then I was going to rent a car and drive down to Melbourne. There’s a fair bit between the two cities, especially the Great Ocean Road, which is one of the biggest tourist attractions in all of Australia.
Fast forward to Thursday night. I’m sitting around hanging out with a few friends and someone mentions that there was someone with COVID in Brisbane. The UK variant at that. A cleaner working at one of the hotels picked it up and went about life as usual for a few days before she knew she had it.
So we wake up on Friday morning and the news from the Queensland government is that Brisbane and a few surrounding areas will go into lock-down starting at 6 PM on Friday. They want some time to figure things out and trace down anyone that may have made contact with this woman.
Thing is, my flight leaves Brisbane Airport at 6:15 PM. So at this point I’m not even sure if my flight is going to be allowed to take off. I look it up online and it still says the flight is scheduled to depart on time.
Which is great but then I need to figure out if I’m going to have to go into a mandatory 14-day quarantine once I touch down in South Australia. After a bit of research I find that anyone traveling from Queensland to South Australia that gets in before midnight Friday (so I guess you can say Saturday) won’t be ushered into a hotel for a government-mandated quarantine.
I find that I’ll need to get a COVID test and remain isolated for a few days before I figure out what the results are. Hence the whole locked up in the hotel ordeal.
When I landed I was told there would be a COVID test provided at the airport. But our flight got in too late (around 10:30) and the nurses were closing up shop at 11 o’clock. So I wasn’t able to get one.
I ended up going to the hospital and getting a COVID test this afternoon. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours before I get the results. I’m sure I’m fine to be fair. I feel good. And Brisbane did a bunch of testing over the last day and no confirmed cases thus far. But you don’t want to be the one guy that ends up on the news because he moved the virus from one state to another.
I checked in last night with no issues. But the manager spoke to me this morning and she was not happy to hear that I was coming from Brisbane. I don’t blame her. But it’s not very fun to be treated like a leper. But there’s nothing else I can do. Staying here was a better idea than bee-lining for the hostel.
So I guess it’s just a wait and see game. I have some things to keep me busy. It’s times like these that I’m happy to have the ukulele. And I’m grateful for having somewhere to write. I need to finish catching up on my entries from November anyway.
I started a new show also. The Queens Gambit. It’s a good watch. You should check it out if you haven’t already seen it.