The COVID Hotel Memoir Released On Amazon: How We Survived 18 Days In COVID Quarantine

 Susan Sontag once said of vacations, “I haven’t been everywhere, but it's on my list.”

After two years of eagerly anticipating an ocean cruise from Rome to Barcelona being canceled several times due to COVID, I stood only a few feet from boarding the Viking Venus ocean liner.

My feet never touched the gangplank because I tested positive for COVID on December 29, 2021, and was immediately taken into the custody of the Italian Government to be sent to a government-run quarantine hotel.

That's the beginning of  my new memoir, The COVID Hotel. 

  I stayed in that one room in isolation for 18 days.

Want to know the number of swirls in the crumbling popcorn ceiling in my room? 24. The number of steps to traverse the room? 21. Doing 754 laps around the room equals three miles.

          It was a COVID Hotel. A Sheraton used by the Italian Government for the last 20 months had been shredded by people trapped in those rooms 24/7.

          Because Linda was my traveling companion, she had to accompany me to the quarantine hotel run by the Italian Ministry of Health, even though she had tested negative for COVID. In fact, during her nine-day “stay” or “sentence” at the COVID Hotel, Linda would test negative for COVID multiple times.

          This memoir is a tale of my 18 days at the COVID Hotel.

This is not simply a tale of a vacation ruined.

This is not MY story.

This is OUR story.

Who is OUR?

During those 18 days of captivity, I met and served my sentence in the COVID Hotel with other vacationers – some on our cruise and others vacationing on their own.

Along the way on our journey, we will encounter cruise people who don’t care and those who do—government officials who blindly apply the rules with no sense of discretion or flexibility. Italian health care workers are overwhelmed by this ongoing public health crisis.

But most of all, you will meet other people like Linda and I trapped in the COVID Hotel. Mostly people on vacation.

These prisoners of the COVID Hotel are from Brazil, Canada, Dubai, Cameroon, England, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Senegal, Syria, and the United States.

Meet the woman from Senegal being sex-trafficked and saved by another quarantine prisoner. There’s an Iraqi war hero who served the U.S. and still suffers from severe injuries while in combat. Or the unknown couple who escaped by tying bedsheets together and climbing out the window.

What happened in those 18 days of captivity was that those prisoners of the COVID Hotel bonded over their shared imprisonment and quickly became a family. 

Check out The COVID Hotel on Amazon. There is a price promo running on the Kindle version beginning May 31. You can buy the ebook for $1.99 beginning that day.