We have been home for several days now, and have about fully recovered from the long travel home. Unfortunately, Stephanie was diagnosed with Covid this past Friday after taking her twice weekly PCR test at work on Thursday. She has mild symptoms so far, and as of today, I have not caught it from her, I took a PCR Test two days ago, and I am waiting on the results. However, this morning, my throat was a little scratchy, which was her first indication of starting to come down with something, later diagnosed as Covid.
Even though she had a slight cough an scratchy throat, she was testing negative on rapid tests that she was taking multiple times daily at work, including a negative rapid test on Friday morning. Since we were both testing at home, how would one have known it is Covid. We were not taking any excessive precautions at home to avoid me catching it because we were not certain it she had Covid versus a regular cold until Friday.
During our return flights, we spent a lot of time waiting in lines at the airport and waiting at crowded airport gates, much more than we ever did on our recent trip to Barcelona. The flights were also longer, so there was just more exposure. It is difficult to tell when Stephanie’s exposure may have occurred, there is not a real definitive answer on the incubation time for Covid, one article we read really narrowed it down as from 1-14 days! It could even have occurred at the end of the cruise, we did know a few people we had met on the cruise who were sick toward the end of the cruise, who knows.
I have been trying to catch up on putting pictures into the daily blog posts, I was working backward in time and have finally completed all of the posts. We have also put images in the Photo Albums for all of our days in Antarctica, plus Disembarkation Day.
We have been putting total trip costs into the blog for the last couple of trips, so there is no reason not to also provide it here for this trip if it helps someone to understand and make decisions about a similar trip they may be interested in. There is no doubt that we, as well as a few other people we met, got tremendous deals on this cruise. We know there were others who booked late like us and got the same deal that we did, but we also met other couples who booked this cruise far in advance and paid full price, which I estimate to be about 50% more for just the Viking cruise costs as a rough guess.
Here is a breakdown of the costs for this trip on a per person basis:
- Cruise Base Fare $7,995.00
- Air Plus & Deviation Fee $ 250.00
- Viking Travel Insurance $ 719.00
- Silver Spirits Drink Package $ 275.00
- Standard Cruise Tips $ 194.00
- Additional Cash Tips $ 75.00
- Airline Seat Upgrades $ 150.00
CRUISE TOTAL $9,658.00
These are the per person costs for the two additional nights we stayed in Buenos Aires before the Viking cruise package started.
- Hotel for 2 Nights $ 54.00
- US Dollars Converted to Pesos $ 90.00
- Taxi From Airport to Town $ 15.00
- Credit Card Meals $ 12.00
BUENOS AIRES TOTAL $ 171.00
The total per person cost for this trip was $9,829.00.
We did purchase a couple of souvenirs that we did not include in the costs above since those are certainly optional costs.
As you can see, Buenos Aires is not an expensive city to visit IF you take advantage of the Blue Dollar Exchange Rate versus the normal bank exchange rate, which is close to half of the Blue Dollar Rate. We certainly recommend contacting your credit card companies before you leave to insure that they are using the MEP exchange rate, which is really close to the Blue Dollar Rate. We were glad we were able to figure out which of our two Visa credit cards gave us the better rate early on in the trip.
It was truly an all inclusive cruise cost as far as excursions were concerned since there was nothing available do outside of the included excursions in Antarctica, compared to a normal ocean or river cruise where you may opt to do more expensive shore excursions instead if the Viking included excursions. The only advice we would give is to try and book as many additional excursions as you can once you are onboard and are allowed to add excursions to the limited pre-cruise booking maximum allowable selections.
As is our normal protocol, we will be converting the trip posts to normal chronological order since the cruise is completed, and reading the posts in chronological order once the trip is over makes more sense. There are also menu selections at the top to read only the Trip Posts or to read only the Trip Planning Posts.
We took a lot of videos with our phones and with a GoPro, so we have been able to add some videos to the blog, also listed in the top menu and on the right side of the blog page. The GoPro was new, so I had to learn how to edit and combine the videos. Unfortunately, we can only add really small file size videos to the blog, the download speed is a little limited so larger videos just are too slow to load.
We will add another Epilogue after we have been home for a few weeks and had time to ponder the trip, adding any plusses or minuses we think of, as well as any other advice on what we learned about the overall trip experience.