Perhaps out of habit, we were up around 06:30, but we managed to get back to sleep, as we had nothing to wake up for this morning.  Crystal was feeling much better, but not quite good, either.  Justin watched the end of the basketball game (Miami tied Boston at 3-3), and then we watched a couple episodes of How It’s Made on the Discovery Channel.  Crystal went back to sleep yet again, and Justin watched UFO, a movie seemingly made by a CalTech or Harvey Mudd graduate, as the protaganist was a "cool" math geek.  

Crystal wasn’t feeling up to brunch, so Justin went solo around 09:30 - the restaurant was far busier than when we’d been going prior to our excursions.  The sparkling wine was pour your own today, perhaps because there were so many more people.  Somehow, despite all the other guests, Justin got the southwest corner table again.  People were still arriving shortly before 10:30.  The weather today was much worse, with a lot of clouds and a lot of wind, plus big waves offshore.  The best days of our entire time at Shanti Maurice was Tuesday-Friday this week, and we got to enjoy 3 of the 4.  Justin texted Crystal to ask if she wanted to come by before the restaurant closed, but she still wasn’t feeling up to it.

After breakfast Justin tried to print out our Attestation Forms and Recovery Letters, and the stupid printer in the hotel library wasn’t visibly printing the part of the Recovery Letter with the letterhead, doctor’s address, phone number, etc.  As it was, it looked like we did it ourselves.  He was getting very frustrated, and eventually gave up.  The person at the front desk said to just email it to them and they could print it, which he did, and the first time everything worked just fine.  He should’ve just done that in the first place.  

Back at the room, we started packing, which is always easier when most everything can go in the checked bag.  We also made reservations for couple’s spa treatment at 14:30.  They’d gifted us the treatment a few days prior, but it could be used only between 10:00 and 15:00, and we’d been gone during this time window the past 3 days.  They’d also gifted us the champagne a week ago - it was very nice of them, and not necessary.  We weren’t sure if it was out of kindness or pity, but we didn’t really care.  

After some packing, Crystal was now sufficiently hungry, so we tried to go to the Red Ginger, but for some dumb reason only people with “Club Level” could eat or drink the full menu, at least until 16:00.  This seemed dumb, so we just went next door to the main restaurant, which Justin had just vacated two hours prior.  We got the same table, one last time.  We both got pasta, Crystal getting spaghetti with aglio e olio, and Justin getting tagliatelle with a spicy creamy chicken sauce.  Both were fine, not great.  We both hydrated with 2 bottles of water each.

We came back to the room for a short while before going to our spa treatment, and did some more packing.  We seemed to be the only two people at the spa.  Our treatment was 90 minutes, full body, the usual relaxing thing.  We hoped it would make for a more relaxing set of flights, and hopefully make it easier for us to get comfortable in our airline seats.  After our massage we went back to the room to shower and then finish our packing.  During the day, the weather had gotten even windier, and we saw people vacating the beach in front of our patio.

As it turned out, us moving up the trip a week helped us with the Seychelles weather immensely, and us moving the Mauritius stuff back a week helped that immensely.  Except for the increased airline ticket prices for moving everything forward, then the 7 day quarantine and having COVID, we lucked out. ;-)  At check-out, we had 3 pages of stuff to review, 11 days worth of meals.  The only item that caught Justin’s eye was one beverage from the mini-bar that he couldn’t remember, but it was a drop in the bucket overall, so he just paid the bill without raising a stink.  The woman who checked us out was the one who showed us to our room the first night and watched us quasi melt down.  She told us she hoped our trip was better after the 5 days in quarantine - we didn’t have the heart to tell her it was 7 instead of 5.  She genuinely seemed to hope we’d enjoyed our time, and we told her we had - genuinely.

We waited for bags to arrive from the room, and they still weren’t there when our driver to the airport arrived.  We had to wait 5 minutes or so, but then they showed up, tags and all.  Our driver had met only one other traveler from America in 25-30 years of working in travel on Mauritius.  He was giddy to meet us, which caught us off guard.  He had a lot of questions about whether we’d enjoyed Mauritius, what we thought, how the service had been, etc.  He also really wanted to discuss the news from the US, which we tried to short circuit.

The drive was going fine until we got in stop-and-go traffic from an accident (which we never saw, just the police directing traffic and an ambulance going by).  As with the rest of our time on Mauritius, there did not seem to be a straight road anywhere on the island, and Crystal was starting to get carsick again.  We got to the airport after just over an hour in the car - we aren’t sure what the normal travel time should’ve been.  At the check-in desk, the employee didn’t know what to do with our Recovery Document, as he wasn’t sure if he needed a copy or something else special.  He also told us that we needed to do our attestation form online; Justin took care of that, as there was fortunately free internet in the airport.

As it turned out, no one needed extra copies or anything, and what we had sufficed to get our boarding passes.  Aside from SSSS on Justin’s boarding pass from Dubai to Los Angeles, check-in was fairly straightforward compared against our angst of what might happen.  There were 4-5 places to choose from after security.  The place with the best looking food and drink sadly had rave music going; it was comical, and we couldn’t help but laugh. 

We sat down around 19:50, and Justin had a monthly Amateur Traveler Zoom call at 20:00 that he was able to make, and it went off without a hitch.  Boarding the plane around 21:00 was no issue, as we were now pretty adept at finding our seats on an A380.  We thought for a solitary moment that we might have an empty seat next to us - nope, no dice.  The flight was due north, going right over Seychelles and right by Socotra, and was fine except for a guy a couple rows back snoring loudly, taking up what seemed like half the oxygen on the plane, whilst wearing no mask and the staff doing nothing about it.