Europe: Part II - Attack of the COVID

After disembarking the Disney ship, we walked down two spots on the same pier to our intended next destination - the Regal Princess.  After waiting a while for check-in to open, we finally got inside the terminal building and took our COVID tests...and I failed :-(.  Apparently I caught COVID sometime during the transatlantic voyage.  Although I wouldn't say I was asymptomatic, the only symptom I really had was a sore throat, which I didn't think was a symptom of COVID, so I didn't think to get tested on the ship.  After testing positive at the terminal, they isolated me in an unairconditioned room and made Aaron wait separately in the main lobby (he tested negative).  Then began a long long 5 hours of waiting for them to find our luggage, which we had dropped off before entering the terminal, and waiting for them to figure out how to give us our test results - we did some quick research immediately and discovered all sorts of things like reimbursements and the timer to be able to get back into the USA depended on that critical first positive test.

I spent the time making new friends with two other passengers who also tested positive.  Thank goodness they were there - it helped me keep a little more calm and positive to have someone to talk to.  Aaron made good use of his time isolated away from me in the lobby by making friends with all sorts of Princess staff.  The lady who told us I was positive and isolated me was the port agent and was not the most informative or helpful.  However, Aaron found an IT guy who gave us the WiFi password and lent us an adapter and the hotel manager from the ship who was able to give us more information about what was going on and what our options were at that point.  Unfortunately we received some bad information from a few people who thought I could rejoin the ship as soon as I tested negative, and suggested we try to meet the ship in 3 days' time in Marseille.  To add to our bad luck, that weekend Barcelona was hosting a Formula 1 race and all of the hotels were insanely expensive (at least $400 a night) and largely unavailable.  The port agent helped us to book a hotel in a nearby town (still insanely expensive), gave us a map and a brief description of how to find the hotel, and had security escort us to the curb outside.  That was it - we were on our own.  We caught a shuttle (that we had to pay cash for!!) to town, then walked to the metro, metro to the train station, and then a train to our hotel in Viladecans.  This was all made extra challenging by the large bags of luggage I had never thought we'd do more than transfer from a cruise ship to a taxi with!

Kicked to the curb...waiting for the metro

Our very expensive hotel room...doesn't look it!  We slept
in separate beds to make some small attempt to prevent Aaron
from catching anything...though since he hadn't caught it yet
we really didn't think he would.

We ran into a couple other couples while checking in to the hotel who had also been on our ship and tested positive when they attempted to reboard the ship for their back-to-back cruises.  Disney handled things much better, actually driving them in a shuttle all the way from the terminal to the hotel!  Here we learned our first lesson: while all this COVID stuff is going on, ALWAYS get tested before leaving the ship so that they take care of you!  While in Viladecans we didn't do much - we wanted to focus on letting my body kick the virus (though I felt fine, clearly it was still hanging out in my system).  The hotel was nicely situated next to a mall with a grocery store and pharmacy and many fast food restaurants.  We talked to the pharmacist and discovered that the pharmacies in Spain no longer test for COVID - you have to go to the hospital or a 'laboratory' and pay much more money - so we picked up a bunch of home tests, figuring that we won't pay for another proctored test again until the home tests showed negative.  We tried to follow up with Princess about getting back on the ship at Marseille but had difficulty getting through to the right people.  We decided after 2 nights that we would go ahead and head to Marseille with hopes of me testing negative and being able to connect with the right people at some point.

Parc de la Marina was located right next to the hotel and 
we spent an evening strolling along its many boardwalks

Our trip to Marseille was VERY eventful.  To start, the nonstop train we hoped to take was sold out, so we had to take a series of local trains, and the Spanish train operator (renfe) of course can't sell French tickets (SNCF), so we could only buy tickets in Barcelona to take us to the French border.  Halfway or so there, the train stopped at Granollers Centre for about 15 minutes before the conductor came on the speaker to tell us in Spanish that we had to get off the train (I figured that much out)...I found him and he told me in English that someone had been hit by a train on the track ahead, so we had to transfer to a bus.  All the passengers piled on a bus that took us to the next station - Sant Celoni.  This was a pretty tiny station with a lot of very confused employees who weren't sure what to do with the multiple busloads of people who had just been dropped at their doorstep.

The mass exodus from the train

The Sant Celoni people finally decided we should all hop on an upcoming train to Figueres...which did NOT get us to our ultimate destination printed on our ticket (Cerbere, France), but the employees said we'd just have to figure it out there 😳.  Properly freaked out, I spent the trip using Google maps to plot up transit directions and determined our best bet to get to Cerbere was to get off this train early and transfer to another one at Girona.  So we did this and I went to the ticket office to get our existing ticket validated for use on the later train.  We hopped on the train to Cerbere and managed to cross the French border without incident.  A lady with excellent English in Cerbere then sold us our onward tickets to Marseille, which required a transfer at Narbonne.  The train from Narbonne was 30 minutes delayed (added to our already multiple hour delay from all the other fiascos).  We finally arrived at our fun hotel in Marseille around 10pm - a Japanese brand called the Toyoko Inn.  This was cheaper than our hotel in Viladecans but much nicer quality everything - and included breakfast!  There were all sorts of neat gadgets in the hotel room.

Aaron's favorite gadget - the toilet with a bidet
attachment that let you position the water 
where you wanted it and change the 
water temperature.  It also featured a 
nightlight and a heated seat.

We still hadn't heard back from Princess but we decided to make the most of the next day and took the ferry to Ile du Frioul.  The island is basically all a national park with multiple forts.  We hiked to the Fort de Ratonneau, where we walked along ALL the narrow eroded dangerous walkways (this wouldn't have been allowed in the USA!).  I got dive-bombed by a seagull parent when I unknowingly walked too close to a nest.  We had fun!

We chose the 'difficult' path to the fort - you can see me just 
barely in the left of the photo - it was a steep hike!

Leaving the fort, we opted for the easy route just for a change
of pace :-)

The next morning we finally got an email back from Princess saying their policy, per the ship's doctor, was that you had to wait 10 days after testing positive before you could rejoin the ship...which meant we couldn't board the ship in Marseille.  We decided to head back to Barcelona, where flights were more plentiful and where we could show we weren't just gallivanting around Europe during quarantine (both Disney and Princess have COVID reimbursement policies for quarantine, so we wanted to make sure not to jeopardize the possibility of getting our hotel and food expenses paid for!).  Fortunately we looked up travel options early in the day...we discovered they were doing construction on the train line from Marseille the next day, so instead of staying one more day as we planned we had about 45 minutes to pack all our things and get to the train station before the last train to Spain left for the day!!  We made it and spent the night in Perpignan, still in France but past all the planned construction (it was a 5 hour trip to Barcelona, so we didn't see a need to do it all in one day).  The following day we continued our journey back to Granollers, a suburb of Barcelona with cheaper hotels.  We finished out our quarantine there, staying in an extended stay hotel with a kitchenette and walking to stores, restaurants, sites, and even a festival that was going on while we were there!  Granollers was a nice little town and we really enjoyed our stay there.

Our groceries!  It was nice to be able to make our 
own food.

The most important site to see in Granollers - the Porxada, which
has withstood a bit of tragedy.

At long last, a negative COVID test!

All sorts of copyright violations at the local festival!

Shortly after arriving in Granollers we FINALLY found a great resource with Family Assistance UK for Princess Cruises.  After the unimpressive communication we had previously we had decided to just throw in the towel and head back to the USA as soon as possible (which, with the CDC's old policy, meant I either had to test negative or wait 10 days and get a doctor's note saying I was ok to travel...from a doctor in Spain...don't get me started, I had worked out in my head the long letter I was going to send to my congressmen about stranding US citizens in foreign countries...but then the CDC changed its policy), but after talking to this new resource we decided we'd go ahead and join the ship in Istanbul.  We would miss about half the cruise, but fortunately most of the early stops were at places we'd already visited, and we could still see most of the new places we hoped to visit on the Princess cruise.  We spent about a day working out Turkish visas, plane tickets, and a hotel in Istanbul.

We got our required pre-cruise COVID tests before leaving the Barcelona airport (just in case...didn't want to repeat this whole quarantine process in Turkey) and took an uneventful flight to Istanbul.  Aaron had booked us a fancy English-speaking car to the hotel, which ended up being a limo!  We got to Istanbul with an extra day to tour (we figured we should not plan to do anything on embarkation day except jump through all the hoops to get on the ship).  We saw all the highlights - the Spice Bazaar, the Grand Bazaar, Topkapi Palace, Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and Suleymaniye Mosque.  Everyone we met was very friendly, and all the architecture was beautiful - and so different from what we were used to in western Europe!  We even got trapped by a carpet salesman, which is apparently quite the Istanbul tourist thing to do.  We rounded out the long day with dinner at a riverside restaurant under a bridge - delightful!

The limo from the hotel

Outside Topkapi Palace

Inside Hagia Sofia - you'll note that 
I had to wear a robe to cover my head and 
knees, and we both had to remove our shoes
(this was true of every mosque we visited)

Inside the Suleymaniye Mosque

Eating dinner at a restaurant on the water under the Galata Bridge

What started as a nightmare ended up being a neat exploration of living a normal life in a town in Spain and exploring two neat cities (Marseille and Istanbul).  Obviously we would have GREATLY preferred to skip all of this and get directly on the Regal Princess, but we did feel that we learned a lot from our experience and made the most of the adventure!  Next in Part III...the remnants of the Regal Princess cruise!