Land of the Icebergs

Bob woke me at 5 am to stand on our deck and view the sunrise over the gleaming white icebergs floating near the Greenland coast; a rainbow curved down and met the sunrise colorband. Breathtaking, awesome and made the trip worthwhile. I sent him on his way to Qarqortoq (spelled as it’s pronounced) as my sore throat from the endoscopy hadn’t really subsided and I felt a cold coming on. Bob’s excursion was to visit a Qarqortoq home; the Inuit home holder had baked all day the day before, and served 20 ship passengers with her treats, conversing through an interpreter. The guide was a shrimp fisherman normally, catching millions of pounds of shrimp in multi-day runs. Bob was enthralled.

After Bob left, I decided that maybe it would be good to take one of the many COVID self-tests we brought. To make a long story short, I’m now isolated in our cabin for five days, and Bob (who is COVID free) has been moved to his own cabin. The good news is that three of those quarantine days are sea days, and two featured excursions (whale watching, iceberg chasing) for which I wasn’t scheduled. And the view from our deck is simply awesome. I should be good to go for Reykavik.

For the scientists among you: the COVID source was almost certainly St. John’s ER and/or the endoscopy procedure. Some staff there were not masked. We were going to send them flowers for being so kind, but I think we’re forgetting those. This COVID case is as minor as it gets; taste and smell are fine. No fever. No GI involvement (did that, already, right?). No fatigue that this inactive person has noticed. Bob is carefully — if unhappily–housed in his own room, just like this one, a floor away, hoping that he continues to be negative. The ship has its own infectious disease doctor, and he will be tested daily. We’re getting very good at packing and unpacking…..and we knew that COVID was a risk we were willing to take.