Em and Stu do Australia Part 6: The Quarantine Diaries

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T’was a month before Christmas, and the endless reinvention of Em and Stu Do Australia continued.

Airports: bit emptier than they used to be.

No nap? No home? No worries.

To recap, we had re-routed our November leg to Adelaide purely because WA classified SA as “very low risk” and thus had the lowest possible chance of forcing us through quarantine to come home in December.

We knew there were no guarantees, but a week before we were due to fly to Perth and then drive to Albany for our final fortnight, all was well.

After all our work, me with two months on the manuscript and Stu parenting Augie, this was to be a “proper holiday” by the beach, socialising with an old friend, co-parenting, taking long walks in nature.

Then several days before our departure, covid cases began to pop up in Adelaide.

So close, yet so far: the tantalising view of Perth we enjoyed for 15 days.

Three days before our flight, Mark McGowan announced arrivals from SA would need to spend two weeks in home quarantine. Hot on the heels of this announcement, a text from WA Police saying our entry passes were cancelled.

Our carefully vetted Albany AirBnB was now out of bounds. We were 24 hours too late to get a refund for the large amount we’d spent on it. Our Perth home was still tenanted until mid-December. The Adelaide accommodation we’d called home for a month was booked out, so staying even one extra night was not an option.

Commence freak-out.

With Augie freshly in bed we went outside to talk in the salubrious location of the wheelie bins so our conversation wouldn’t rouse him.

Thankfully has no idea his minders don’t know what to do with him.

The planned dry night was cancelled. Glasses of wine balanced on the bins, I rang the Albany AirBnB hosts to explain the situation and beg for our money back, though by the AirBnB policies were clear that we weren’t entitled to it back at this late stage.

Thankfully the AirBnB was run by a professional accommodation provider who told us that ‘of course’ we could have a refund because they understood about covid laying waste to plans.

One down. But where to go?

Stu refilled my wine with the precious end of the bottle. We began scouring AirBnB looking for homes in Perth.

If you couldn’t tell from the list of activities we got up to in Adelaide, even with me working until 1pm or 2pm each day, we generally relied heavily on having an activity/outing twice a day with Augie, once pre-nap with Stu, and once post-nap with us both.

Thanking the good Lord for making clamshell sandpits.

We didn’t have backyards or pools, and carried minimal toys, and didn’t have friends to go hang out with, so we hung on to our low-key tourism-style activities as well as trips to the park, playground or library (or pub).

The thought of two weeks in quarantine, entertaining a toddler with no outings, left us cold with dread. We were going to need a backyard, a decent size place. But only three days out, full-size homes available for 15 nights were both rare and charging thousands.

Easy to justify for an idyllic last-hurrah fortnight on the beach in Albany; not so much for enforced quarantine in Perth.

My Mum’s upper floor was not available as she had other houseguests, Stu’s parents was all on one level and would not have been appropriate to sequester us as thoroughly as the rules demanded.

We scoured our contacts books but it is no small favour to ask someone even who has a suitable place.

The wind put an end to our council of war by blowing my precious final glass of wine on to the pavement and shattering it.

Finally we decided Stu would call an old friend in the morning and ask to stay on the upper floor of his house where we could have our own sleeping and living spaces separate from the main house, yet access a backyard and pool via a separate exit. We felt we had done nothing to deserve such a favour and very uncomfortable about asking.

Why read whole book when you can just read the Animals page repeatedly?

The following day, once it was a decent hour in Perth, Stu made his call. This wonderful friend said yes without hesitation, making us very lucky.  

Accommodation secured, we breathed easy for the first time in a day.

That afternoon, we received a text from Qantas cancelling the flight we were booked on to fly in two days’ time.

The only other flight was at night, too late for Augie or for reaching our host house; we could not accept any more credits from Qantas after already having to cancel multiple flights on this trip. We needed a refund in cash. This meant calling Qantas, something any sane person would avoid if at all possible.

We began juggling the phone and Augie back and forth. During the hold, we reapplied for and got our new G2G entry passes to WA.

We booked a new flight on Virgin. An hour later, while still on hold, we received a text from Qantas telling us that they had automatically rebooked us on the night flight.

Now we had two flights. We looked at each other and laughed a trifle maniacally.

After three hours on hold, we finally got hold of a Qantas person on the phone, who sorted a refund (but told us it’d take ten weeks, good grief).

 We were now sorted to go home, but it was a very different homecoming than what was planned. No reunion hugs with family, no boozy, chatty visits, no handing over of little presents and watching of photos. Just the challenge of moving into yet another place, and the yawning two weeks ahead.

Quarantine is a strangely stressful kind of boring: calls from contact tracing nurses checking up on your movements and arrangements, alarms on your phone at least once a day at random from WA Police demanding you take a selfie, which is then GPS checked to make sure you are there. If you miss it, you’ll have one chance to explain yourself before police come a-knocking. So instead of disconnecting from it all, you keep one paranoid eye on your phone at all times.

One of quarantine’s unexpectedly beautiful moments.

Apart from that, there is only the question of What To Do. Stu and I would be perfectly capable of entertaining ourselves with nothing more than books and Netflix and video games, but unfortunately that was only possible for an hour during Augie’s day nap and an hour or two after his bedtime.

Thanks be to deliveries our family members arranged for us. The backyard pool and the clamshell sandpit were lifesavers, as were books, puzzles, water play on the pavement and a certain safari animal magnet kit that still makes me shudder when I look at it, so many times did we decide where the lion should go and enthuse that there were TWO zebras.

A 15-month-old has an attention span per activity ranging between 30 seconds and an absolute, rare maximum of 20 minutes if you have found something unusually enthralling. The moments they are so absorbed that you can do your own thing in the same area while keeping one eye on them is basically a silly dream.

FREEDOM!

Facing four hours at a stretch entertaining such a person is challenging no matter where you are. But when you go somewhere to fill the time, as we did in Hobart and Adelaide, it is a different kind of work: much packing of nappies, meals, spoons, bibs, creams, toys, prams, etc, twice a day, and inevitably you forget to do something important and after you’ve been out for an hour or two the baby is tired and over it and you need to take him home, battling traffic with the unaccountably soothing Baby Shark on repeat.

Once the possibility of doing all this was removed, life slowed right down. While this is not how we had imagined ending our trip – with what seemed a whimper, not a bang – there was a real beauty in these uncluttered hours with Augie, watching him learn and grow and play and build skills by the hour and by the day, watching him go from walking to running, seeing his face screwed up in delight as he jumped into my arms in the pool, observing him wriggle his toes in the sand, pouring endless cups of “tea” on to the warm paving stones. Staring at the sky or feeling the breeze on my skin while he did this was the closest I’d got to a meditative existence since he was born.

And so we ended our spate of bad luck feeling lucky: close together, safe and well and, most importantly, home.

Next up: a bonus post detailing our top 10 experiences across our Australian trip (spoiler alert: not quarantine).