What It Was Like Aboard the Grand Princess in Oakland

A drone buzzed around like a bee about 50 feet away from Rex Lawson’s balcony.

He watched a convoy of ambulances and vans pull up below. Workers in protective suits moved about, while what appeared to be news helicopters hovered overhead.

“I have to comb my hair so I’ll look good on TV,” Lawson, 86, a retired United Airlines pilot, joked. He marveled at the “tremendous amount of logistics” at work around him.

Given what he had been through, he seemed to be in high spirits.

Lawson and his wife, Mardell Lawson, 81, were two of the more than 2,400 passengers held aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship, which docked at the Port of Oakland on Monday, after becoming a symbolic target of fear of the coronavirus as it circled off the California coast.

What began as a 15-day cruise to Hawaii has become an ordeal that will now last roughly a month; passengers like the Lawsons, who were not among the 21 people aboard who tested positive for the virus, won’t be returning home once they disembark sometime in the next couple of days.

While those confirmed to have the virus were to be put in “proper isolation,” according to Vice President Mike Pence, other passengers will be whisked to military bases, where they were set to wait out 14-day quarantines.

According to The Mercury News, more than 1,000 crew members, many of whom are from the Philippines, will stay on the quarantined ship when it leaves Oakland, although it’s unclear where it will go.

Only 45 people aboard have been tested so far, meaning that the number of infections seemed likely to rise in coming days.

The Lawsons, who live in Santa Cruz, California, were set to be taken to Travis Air Force Base, about an hour away from the port, along with many of the other passengers who live in California.

An Air Force veteran, Lawson told me he’d been to the base “quite some time ago,” but now he expected this visit to be marked largely by the fact that he wouldn’t be able to hit the golf course as he had planned for his return home.

And the food, he guessed, would be less appealing than it had been aboard the ship — even on the extra days.

On the boat, he said, they’ve been served three solid meals a day.

“Sometimes it’s a little cool, or it’s a little late, but there are fruits and vegetables,” Lawson said. “If we had to be in quarantine, this is about the best you could possibly hope for.”

They’ve watched television — mostly MSNBC — and greeted neighbors from their small balcony.

When the ship crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge, he said, “everybody clapped and yelled.”

He said he was “not in a great deal of worry,” even though he knows that he and his wife are in the age range of people who could be particularly vulnerable to the illness, and that a man who had previously been on the ship died from the virus.

The couple have been on roughly two dozen cruises, he said. This one, which departed from San Francisco and required no air travel, began as a convenient winter getaway.

And in spite of everything, the Lawsons said they’d probably take another cruise in the future.

“It’ll be a while,” he said. His wife chimed in: “Someday!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .