“Why are you taking medications for two weeks longer than the trip?” my husband asked when I was packing for a recent trip to Italy. “In case there’s a volcano in Iceland,” I replied, because ever since the Eyjafjallajokull volcano sent clouds of ash and dust into the atmosphere -- interrupting air travel between Europe and North America by grounding more than 100,000 flights and stranding millions of passengers -- I’ve packed defensively. The 2010 eruption was relatively small, but its impact was massive. Europe experienced air-travel chaos for almost a month. Although it was unlikely that anything similar would ever affect us, there was a volcano warning a few weeks before we flew to Ecuador.
What I called “prudent precautions” others deemed excessive overpacking -- that is until February 2020, when we were quarantined in Japan for two extra weeks on the infamous Diamond Princess cruise ship, and then two more weeks on a Texas Air Force base. I only had medication for 10 additional days, and it took a heroic friend to gather everything and ship it overnight to Japan, then a supreme effort to retrieve the package from Customs.
