For your own good

As we were getting ready to return to Fidenza, I fretted about the usual things--what to pack, how early we should get to the airport, how many issues of The New Yorker I should bring in my carry-on as emergency reading--and also about the risk of inhaling a Delta viron or two during the course of our journey. What had us waking up in the middle of the night before we finally got on the plane, however, wasn't the threat of  COVID but the ever-shifting list of COVID-related hoops we'd have to jump through before we'd be allowed back into Italy.

Remember when a passport and an airplane ticket were all you needed to board a flight from the U.S. to Europe? No longer. Lured by a low business-class fare, we'd booked tickets on British Air, which meant flying through London. But thanks to Boris Johnson's mishandling of the pandemic (or, some say, European bitterness about Brexit), anyone traveling from the United Kingdom to Italy had to get a negative COVID test result within 48 hours before arriving, a full day less than the 72-hour grace period for people coming direct from the U.S. And this was true even for those who, like us, were only going to be in Heathrow airport for an hour or two. 

Meanwhile the U.K. requires a "passenger locator form," so that if someone on the flight does come down with COVID, all passengers can be tracked down, although exactly for what purpose isn't specified. This is a lengthy form, to be filled out online, wherein you must specify everything from your seat number to any address you're occupying before, during, and after your flight. 

The European Union has its own equally extensive passenger locator form, also online. Both of these forms are supposed to be filled out at the last minute, and if anything changes--a leg of your flight, a seat number--you have to do the whole thing over again. 

Italy also wanted proof of vaccination before you got on a plane heading there. We had the vaccine cards showing that we'd gotten our shots last spring, but I worried that no one would believe these scraps of badly printed cardboard were really official documents. Shortly before we left we discovered that the state of California had quietly introduced an online version of the vax card, complete with a QR code. Figuring that would be useful, we spent considerable time wrestling with the California system and getting these documents onto our phones, since that seems to be the preferred way to prove your vax status among civilized people.

On top of all that, British Air urged us to input all of our information, including our vaccine status, into some third-party app that would theoretically allow us to breeze through check-in by showing that we'd already met all the above requirements. What a lovely idea, right? Even if it meant sharing our personal data with yet another faceless entity. Unfortunately, the app was something of a disaster, and we were frantically trying to get it to work right up until we left for the airport.

A selection of our travel documents, assembled by Danny.

Most stressful of all was getting the COVID tests. A rapid antigen test wouldn't do; a PCR molecular test is required. Our health system provides them for free, but with a two- to three-day wait for results. To make that 48-hour deadline, we had to find someplace that could turn the results around in less than 24 hours. Danny spent days scouring the internet and found several places that were happy to give results in a few hours but charged hundreds of dollars for this usually free test. Eventually he located a reputable outfit that worked out of Oakland Airport, about half an hour from us, and promised low-cost results in six hours. We made an appointment for Saturday afternoon, the day before our Sunday flight.

Unfortunately, their website proved to be chockablock with misinformation. When we arrived for our appointment we discovered that, despite what the website said, this location didn't do the test we needed. However, they were able to send us over to another site a few minutes away to get the tests. More worrying, we learned it might take up to 24 hours to get the results, not the six hours the website had promised. ("We know," the folks at the testing site said. "We keep telling them to fix it.")  With our check-in time less than 24 hours away, we spent the evening anxiously checking our phones, willing the results to appear.

Danny woke me up a little after 3 a.m. The results were in, and we'd tested negative. Now we just had to upload the test report and add that information to our various documents, which we spent a couple of anxious middle-of-the-night hours doing. 

We also tried to check in for our flight. But despite having all our information at the electronic ready, British Air informed us that we would have to go through check-in in person, so that our documentation could be reviewed. Remembering the endless check-in lines we'd waited in during previous trips, we decided to get to the airport even earlier than we'd planned.

Back in the days before there was an internet, Danny's travel preparations always included preparing a folder with all flight information, hotel reservations, and so on in writing. He's maintained that practice even as more and more people, mostly younger, do everything with their phones. And so his carry-on included print-outs of all our flight and seat numbers, taxi confirmation, locator forms, test results, and vaccine cards, and even a copy of our marriage license in case someone challenged the reality of our 50-plus years of respectability. I thought he was being silly, but I wasn't going to sneer at someone else's security blanket when I was lugging several months' worth of New Yorkers. 

When we got to the airport, though, we discovered that flying business class allowed us to prance past Economy's long, glacially slow check-in lines and step right up to one of the counters reserved for the plutocracy. Moreover, the woman checking us in was thrilled that Danny had all our information ready to hand on paper, and so was I when I watched a couple at the next counter trying vainly to locate their documents on a phone that didn't have quite enough signal. 

From there pretty much everything went as smoothly as I could have hoped. With several hours to kill, we strolled off to the mostly empty plutocrats' lounge for a free lunch and some time with the New Yorker food issue. At the gate, we boarded early and settled into our business-class pods with a glass of complimentary champagne. The dinner and, later, breakfast we were served were surprisingly tasty and the service couldn't have been nicer. And the lie-flat seats, though not anywhere near as comfortable as an actual bed, were a huge improvement over spending the night hunched over in Economy.

I should note that we wore N95 masks through all of this, aside from when we were eating and drinking, and that this was exceedingly unpleasant. You can tell those masks are really effective by how hot and uncomfortable they are, and trying to sleep while wearing one was an experience I don't look forward to repeating. But I am no anti-masker, and I was, if not exactly happy to mask up, certainly willing to do my part by wearing one. 

Masked up in Fidenza's central piazza.

When we arrived in Italy, our vaccination and test documents were accepted without problems, our taxi showed up only a few minutes late, and soon we were in Fidenza, sitting in the piazza with Pam and Romano and watching the sun go down as we sipped Negronis and nibbled on pizza. All the hassle seemed worth it. So did flying business class, even if next time we can't get a super-low fare. 

I do wonder, though, about all the data-gathering the pandemic has unleashed. Once the virus is finally defeated, will all these requirements become just a memory? Or will this be like 9/11, where the emergency of the moment morphs into a new normal that we all have no choice but to submit to?