Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today I scheduled my Covid-19 booster shot. I'm pretty much on the verge of 6 months since getting my 2nd Pfizer vaccine dose, and I match the conditions approved by the FDA and CDC for getting a booster right now. Thankfully the CVS pharmacy website has been fixed so I didn't technically have to lie (see previous link) to get an appointment. And I don't have to travel over 100 miles for it, either! I'll get my booster shot at a clinic a few miles away on Monday just before lunchtime.

There's irony in the fact I've scheduled my third shot just as Covid-19 finished ripping through part of my family that dithered and made excuses not to get their first shots. Some of us boarded the clue train right away; others don't get it even when hit in the face with a clue-by-4. Well, I'd like to these relatives when I travel for Thanksgiving— but it's got to be safe. Getting a booster this week sets me up for being as safe as I can in visiting Head-in-the-sand America 6 weeks from now.

Since getting my second Covid-19 shot yesterday I've experienced only mild side effects. Yesterday I felt achier than seemed warranted given the modest physical exercise I did. Overnight I had a sore throat and a stuffy nose... though I believe these are more attributable to the seasonal allergies I've had the past 2 weeks than to the vaccine. Throughout the day I've continued to have dull body aches. I'm now at T+32 hours. Overall this seems even milder than the side effects I had after my first shot— and definitely milder than Hawk's second-shot symptoms. ...Assuming that my allergy- and cold-like symptoms are, indeed, from allergies and/or a light cold.

Two more weeks now. Two more weeks to build maximum immunity. Then I can shift up to the next stage of returning to normalcy. All I'll have to worry about when will be all the Covidiots who aren't getting shots because they think the pandemic is a hoax and the vaccine is deadly sham.

Three weeks after I got my first Covid-19 vaccine shot— which entailed a road trip of 108 miles each way— I'm heading out to get my second shot tomorrow morning. And this one only requires driving 87 miles each way! 😂

It's closer because this time I'm only driving to Napa. "Only"!



Yes, Napa is well known as wine country. Napa Valley is the most prestigious wine-growing region in the US and one of the premier locations in the world. While "Napa Valley" is regional designation used for classifying where wine grapes are grown, Napa is also an actual city (pop. 80,000-ish) in that region and is the county seat of Napa County.

That fun little bit of travelog aside, I'm not actually going to Napa, Napa Valley, or Napa County for wines. I'm going for my second vaccine shot. Could I combine the trip with wine tasting? Sure; but it's just not fun right now. Wineries have changed their tasting programs for the practical demands of the no-really-it's-not-over-yet Coronavirus pandemic. It's not fun for Hawk, who's accompanying me and can't drink, and it's not worth it.

So, are we just going to drive 174 miles round trip for my shot and call it a day? Heck, no! There's great weather on tap— sunny and 77° in the forecast— and beautiful countryside to enjoy it in. We plan to go for a short hike to a waterfall after I get my shot.

Then, if time permits and I'm feeling well, maaaybe we'll stop at a winery or two. 😇😅🍷

Update: See how the day turned out! Keep reading in next blog.

The roadtrip I planned yesterday to get my first Covid-19 vaccine shot was successful. This was me at about 4:35pm Friday:



The background in this picture may look familiar. You see the aisles and shelves of a well known chain drugstore/pharmacy, the kind of which there are several within 5 miles of my home. As I've written previously this week, though, I wasn't able to get a shot within five miles of home. I searched and searched and found the closest appointment one hundred and five miles from home.

Just finding that appointment took way longer than should have been necessary, but that was only the start. As is often the case, getting there was most of the battle. Here are Five Things:

1) My appointment was in Davis, California, 105 miles away. Davis is beyond even the exurbs of the San Francisco Bay Area. It's out in the Central Valley, part of the greater Sacramento region, in the mostly agricultural and rural County of Yolo. It's not a cow town, though. It's a college town. UC Davis, one of the campuses of the prestigious University of California, is there. Cow Town, aka Vacaville, is 15 miles away. Yes, there's really a city in California whose name literally translates to "Cow Town"!



2) The 105 mile route is mostly highways and could be driven in as little as 1 hour 35 minutes. That's the timing Google Maps gave as I wrote this at 7am Saturday. Going on a Friday afternoon, though, I knew I'd hit traffic. As I left home at 1:30pm Google estimated arrival at 3:31. I was in good shape, I figured. With my 4:15 appointment I'd have time to spare.

It's a good thing I planned "time to spare". There was traffic seemingly everywhere along the route. Friday afternoons, starting as early as 1pm, have always been hell leaving Silicon Valley and driving out toward Sacramento. I thought from Google Maps' estimate the "Friday escape" traffic had abated a bit thanks to the lockdown. Alas, no. Whether it's due to warming weather, people getting more confident about the end of the pandemic, or people just getting sick of pandemic precautions and wanting to travel, the Friday escape route was clogged all the way.

As I sat in one particular traffic jam, barely moving, I updated Google Maps and saw that my ETA had slipped to almost 4:30. I'd be late! Will they give my shot away? I worried. I told myself the answer was "No". If they were going to give it away it'd be at the end of the day, at the end of the week. ...Though here it was Friday afternoon. Acquaintances of mine have gotten shots on Friday afternoons on the basis of, "Hey, we've got unused shots, come on over and get one!"

Traffic picked up a bit after that, and I parked at the pharmacy at exactly 4:15pm. The wait was short, though by the time I was done with my shot 20 minutes later there were several people in line.

3) I was surprised how lax enforcement of the policies for vaccine eligibility is. If you made an appointment, you were given a shot. They simply asked you if you were eligible. All you had to do was nod your head. There was no verification of anything. I didn't even have to show ID.

On the one hand, this is how it should be. Shots for everyone, few questions asked. On the other hand, that's not how it should be. Shots are in short supply, and governments are managing policies to determine which groups of people get priority first, second, third, etc. It's evident from yesterday than where the rubber meets the road, all the policies and rules are just idle talk.

4) On my drive home— which BTW went extremely fast, right around Google Maps' no-traffic 1:35 estimate— I heard an interesting news piece on NPR's "California Report". Vaccine distribution varies significantly by county in California right now. A recent policy to allocate 40% of the supply to "hard hit" areas has disrupted plans counties made before the change. The article noted that Santa Clara County, where I live, has zero zip codes identified by the state as "hard hit". Santa Clara has had to stop scheduling first-shot appointments to save its supply for second shots, they explained. Well, no wonder; the county lost 40% of its supply! Meanwhile, the article continued, counties such as Solano have so much supply they can't find enough people to take the shots. Solano has opened up eligibility wider than state guidelines so its supply doesn't go to waste.

It was ironic that I heard about Solano County as I was driving through Solano County. That's not where I got the shot, though. Davis is in Yolo County, the next one over. But quite possibly Yolo is in a similar situation to neighboring Solano, and that's why there were lots of appointments available there when I searched on Monday and zero anywhere less than 100 miles from home.

5) It occurred to me as I was driving home, along a route that I've driven countless times in the past for Friday escape/Sunday return, that this 105 mile (each way) trek is the farthest from home I've been in five months. The last was our road trip to the North Coast mid-October. Yes, just trying to get a damn vaccination has been my biggest adventure in almost half a year.

After looking for a Coronavirus vaccine appointment this morning and finding absolutely none available anywhere near home anytime I took another look this afternoon. This time I specifically searched in Fresno, which I obliquely referred to in my previous post as "a city 160 miles away". Indeed, CVS pharmacies around Fresno had numerous appointments available this week Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri. I checked back because after letting the idea percolate for a few hours because I was ready to make a multi-day trip out of it.



The CVS store I focused in on was actually in Clovis, CA. It's part of the metropolitan Fresno area (FWIW I'm chucking as I write that phrase) and it's about 170 miles away. Traveling there & back would be a 350 mile roundtrip. To make it work during the workweek without taking time off (I have critical meetings this week) I figured I could drive down the night before, get a hotel, get a shot the next day after my meetings— oh, and stay at the hotel a second night so I wouldn't have to drive home 3 hours while possibly experiencing side effects of the shot.

I had literally already started looking up hotels when I decided to try the appointments site one more time for options closer to home. A few appointments in Hayward (30 miles away) appeared for Wednesday afternoon then disappeared moments later in the time it took me to double-check my work schedule. As I typed in the names of cities in the area in an ever widening radius from home I hit pay dirt in Davis.



Davis is closer to home; it's "only" 105-110 miles away. That may not seem numerically like a huge savings vs. 170 miles for Clovis but the difference is that the roundtrip becomes feasible as a half-day drive. I can get out there & back in a tad over 2 hours each way. With a late afternoon appointment on Friday I only need to take a few hours off from work and I can be back home in time for dinner.

CVS prompted me to schedule an appointment for my second shot while I was booking the first. (I'm scheduled to get the Pfizer vaccine.) Davis area stores had no appointments available in the +3 weeks timeframe. I went back to searching in a widening spiral from home and found an appointment in Napa for Saturday, April 10. "I can take you wine-tasting afterward!" Hawk gushed. Uh, I'm not sure that would be wise... and for now I'm just happy enough to have appointments scheduled.