{"id":12130,"date":"2021-12-15T10:57:07","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T15:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sailpandora.com\/?p=12130"},"modified":"2021-12-15T10:57:07","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T15:57:07","slug":"will-returning-to-antigua-be-easier-than-visiting-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sailpandora.com\/?p=12130","title":{"rendered":"Will returning to Antigua be easier than visiting Cuba?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s nearly Christmas and life is a bit crazy, with family events and all the details of getting ready to close up the house and head back to Antigua and Pandora.<\/p>\n

And, speaking of Pandora, my friend Bill sent me this photo, taken from his room at the Admiral’s Inn in English Harbor earlier this week, of Pandora safe and sound on her mooring, awaiting our return.\u00a0 \"\"Our plans for heading back to Antigua have us getting a rental car on the 29th and heading into NYC to visit our son Christopher and his partner Melody before going to JFK the next day to fly out.<\/p>\n

And, speaking of Chris and Melody, who have lived with us here in CT for much of the pandemic, decided not to move back to San Francisco and instead moved into NYC a few weeks ago.\u00a0 Yahoo!\u00a0 So great and they actually have a two bedroom place so we can visit, and NEVER LEAVE!.<\/p>\n

So back to Antigua.\u00a0 Some months ago I noticed that my passport expires in May but with all the delays caused by the pandemic, I didn’t worry much about that, knowing that I would be heading home to the US with Pandora, in the spring, about the time that my passport will expire.\u00a0 I figured that if I arrived in the US aboard Pandora with a nearly expired passport, I’d be Ok.\u00a0 What would they do?\u00a0 Send me back?\u00a0 Not likely and then I would be in the US anyway and could get my passport renewed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wrong!\u00a0 The problem with all this is that I didn’t even think about the\u00a0 plan to visit other islands in the Caribbean this winter, all of which require a passport to be some 5-6 months from expiration, which it won’t be.\u00a0 \u00a0Don’t ask how I got confused about all this, I just did.\u00a0 Now, not so confused.\u00a0 Well, not on this topic anyway.<\/p>\n

This is now a LOT more urgent as we will likely leave Pandora in Trinidad this summer and there is no way that I will be able to clear in with a passport that will expire within a few weeks of my arrival.<\/p>\n

So, on Monday, a few days ag0,\u00a0 I focused on trying to find a way to “expedite” the renewal.\u00a0 No simple feat, as these days, in an age of Covid, it takes months to renew unless you are able to use the “life or death emergency” option.\u00a0 “Officer, it’s life or death as I really need to get back to my boat in the Caribbean, you know, where it’s warm when you are freezing in the north.\u00a0 Yes, I need to see fireworks.\u00a0 I’ll die if I don’t.”\u00a0 Hmm…\u00a0 I’ll have to work on the message.<\/p>\n

So, in a near panic, I began to search online and discovered that there are plenty of services that purport to be able to get a passport renewed in just a few days, for a price.\u00a0 Well, that price, it turns out, is upwards of $1,000 including government charges.\u00a0 \u00a0Not a trifling number but I’m desperate.<\/p>\n

So, I picked one, www.govworks.com, and began to fill out a series of questions.\u00a0 Oddly, the first step was to put in my credit card number before I had even applied.\u00a0 I should have seen that one coming and bailed immediately.\u00a0 However, I stuck with it.\u00a0 After a long list of questions including email addresses, birthdate and contact info for Brenda too, they asked for my SS number.\u00a0 RED FLAG!\u00a0 Alert! Alert!\u00a0 Danger Will Robinson, Danger Will Robinson!!! \"\"NO WAY, so I bailed and tried to undo what I had started.\u00a0 No such luck and a short while later, a charge to my credit card of $700.\u00a0 \u00a0It’s going to be fun to get that charge removed from my Visa account.\u00a0 I do love a challenge.<\/p>\n

Ok, so that service was a bad idea.\u00a0 What next?\u00a0 I had no idea so I called the office of our town First Selectman and they recommended that I call our state senator, Chris Murphy.<\/p>\n

Bingo!\u00a0 \u00a0One of Senator Murphy’s aids called me back and said that he would personally expedite my request.\u00a0 I guess he likes fireworks.\u00a0 Actually, I didn’t say anything about that but my tale of woe seemed to be enough to inspire him to help.\u00a0 I did own up that I had voted for the Senator, a democrat, in the last election and likely would again.\u00a0 I also mentioned that I am registered as a republican, albeit a disenchanted one just to confirm that I was a constituent worth helping in my hour of need.<\/p>\n

Anyway, my new best friend Claude, the senator’s aid, said he was going to bat for me and get an appointment.<\/p>\n

Of course, passports apply to all sorts of international travel, both by boat and jet but for me, the bulk of passport use involves Pandora.\u00a0 With all the island to island travel over the last decade, I have a good number of pages in my passport full of entry and exit stamps, including from Cuba in 2016.<\/p>\n

How’s that for an awkward segue?\u00a0 Cuba?\u00a0 It makes sense to me as I am reminded of the last time I had to really think hard about the complexities of traveling outside of the US, in 2016 when we visited Cuba.<\/p>\n

If you were to look at all the stamps in my soon-to-expire passport, you’d see a very faint stamp from Cuba.\u00a0 I mention the fact that my passport has a stamp from Cuba in it as the standard when an American visits Cuba is for the officer to insert a piece of paper into the passport and stamp that, instead of stamping a page in the book itself, lest a US official will see that we visited Cuba.\u00a0 \u00a0Of course, that’s because Americans are not supposed to visit Cuba.\u00a0 In our case, we were there legally so I was sure to make them stamp my book.\u00a0 Sadly, the stamp is so faint you can hardly read it.<\/p>\n

Things have changed a lot since that brief moment in time when Cuba was open to US citizens. and once again I am focused on all that goes into international travel, if for different reasons.\u00a0 When we went to Cuba we were visiting an “enemy state” and now just about everywhere you might go, you are visiting “enemy territory” compliments of Covid-19.<\/p>\n

I can still remember the surreal experience of clearing into Santiago de Cuba, all bleary eyed from our long three day run from Georgetown Great Exuma. in the Bahamas.\u00a0 We were very exhausted, and a bit overwhelmed, with the more than two hour process, meeting with multiple officials who had all the time in the world to spend with us as they had so few visiting boats to process.<\/p>\n

All of this conjures up some wonderful memories.\u00a0 The experience of clearing into Santiago de Cuba is a story worth revisiting so check out this post<\/a>.\u00a0 The photo below is of the medical officer that visited us in quarantine, flaming red hair and all.<\/p>\n

Everyone flies a Q flag when clearing into a country but it’s not a formality in Cuba where we were instructed to head to a far away corner of the harbor.\u00a0 And, certainly not these days when “Q” as in quarantine is taken seriously, with the risk of importing yet another case of Covid.\u00a0 Back then, in Cuba, it was all about yellow fever.<\/p>\n

Quarantine or not, formalities completed, we shared a beer with the medical officer.\u00a0 For us, a first, not before or since…<\/span>\"\"Meeting a medical officer with punk style red hair was nothing to compare to seeing the Rolling Stones play in Havana.\u00a0 Perhaps yet another random segue but since I brought it up <\/span>here’s a link to a post<\/a> about that amazing experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s hard to imagine a time when being in crowds like this will ever feel normal again. \"\"
\nTo say that this was a unique, once in a lifetime, experience doesn’t begin to describe what it was like to be there, on a sultry night in Havana with a million fans.\u00a0 It was crazy.\u00a0 Think of a mosh pit covering acres and acres and you get the idea.<\/p>\n

This short clip below gives a feel for what it was like that night.\u00a0 The Stones opened with Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a song that they first sang at concert in 1968.\u00a0 It’s still a great tune decades later.<\/p>\n

You can watch the entire “Havana nights” concert on YouTube but this short clip captures the feeling of that night when they opened with their first song.
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