Montgolfier

We are home from our travels out of the country and I’m back to blogging. I missed having this outlet while I was away and it was nice to get a few comments that some of you would miss my posts too. I may be a bit loopy this morning because it seems I brought home an extra souvenir in the form of COVID-19. I started coughing and sneezing yesterday a lot on the plane. I feel rather bad for the person who was sitting in our row with us, but so far Max is COVID negative based on the test swab I drilled into his sinuses and up into his brain, or so he claimed last night, so maybe it’s just me.

The three of us (Sarah, Max and me, not the three of us in Row 34-ABC) managed to avoid COVID completely during its heyday. I’m really glad Sarah did not have to go through this. Despite being “medically fragile,” Sarah actually was in robust health for the most part. She had a couple of ear and strep throat infections as a little kid but really was not “sick sick” very much at all. She had good resistance, and of course she had all her vaxes and boosters.

We thought of Sarah all the time when we were traveling and we saw signs of her too. When we got to the British Museum, we walked first into an alcove exhibit about late 18th Century “Balloonmania” for large balloons you could ride in over the countryside called Montgolfiers. On display were plates decorated with balloons and other decorations with balloons on them. It was a very small exhibit but we got a kick out of it. Also, when we arrived in Edinburgh and came out of the train station, it had stopped raining for a few minutes, and there was a huge rainbow in the sky. People were stopping and taking pictures of it. It was really spectacular.

Finally, and I’m not sure why this incident meant so much, we were eating in an Italian restaurant on the last night of our trip, sitting near the windows of the restaurant, and a family finished up and left. Their little girl went out with them and then ran back to the window where we were and started waving to us. I just felt it had something to do with Sarah. I don’t know. I may be a little feverish. I’m going to call the doctor’s office when it opens and ask for some Paxlovid.