Couple kept apart nearly six months on opposite sides of the world by Covid-19 lockdowns reunited on Costa Almeria

CELEBRATING: Ian and Marie raise a glass to being reunited CREDIT: Ian and Marie Craig

A COSTA Almeria-based couple is finally together again after Covid-19 lockdowns kept them apart on opposite sides of the world for nearly half a year.
Australian born Marie Craig set off for her homeland to visit family in mid-February when Covid-19 was still “something that was happening in China,” her Glaswegian husband Ian told the Euro Weekly News.

Marie had expected to be back home in Taberno with Ian by the middle of April. Then four weeks after she left Spain went into total lockdown and just after that all international flights into Spain were suspended.
The couple have been together for 14 years after meeting through a mutual friend in Cala D’Or in Mallorca where Ian used to have a bar. The enforced separation for all those months was then “a real heartbreaker for both of us,” Ian admitted.
“It has been a testing and upsetting time.”
Thanks to technology they could keep in regular contact, and even had online ‘date nights,’ talking for two to three hours at a time.
Even so it was tough.
“Knowing it wasn’t just happening to us and there were lots of people in the world worse off helped me get through it,” Marie revealed.
She also believes that in some way it was meant to be for her to be in Adelaide during those months as it allowed her to spend valuable time with friends and family; her father was diagnosed with the early signs of Alzheimer’s while she was there and a dear friend from her home city passed away.
The couple were eventually reunited at Murcia station on Friday July 24 having had their hopes raised several times that Marie would be able to travel to Spain only to be dashed, and following what turned out to be an epic 42-hour journey from Adelaide.
Even right up until the last hours they weren’t sure Marie would actually make it back to Spain as she had to go via Melbourne: currently under lockdown due to a resurgence in Covid-19 cases.
The ‘new normal’ meant the reunion wasn’t quite the “big hug, slowed down movie moment” Marie had imagined. Face masks, social distancing and the vast amount of luggage she’d brought back with her made it practical rather than romantic, the long awaited embrace put off until they were in the car.
Marie also found her return to Spain “weird.” Not only had she walked straight into a heatwave from a chilly mid-winter Adelaide, she found the sight of everyone’s faces hidden by masks something of a shock at first.
Now safely back at the cortijo which they moved to in April 2017 and which they have completely renovated, Ian and Marie are celebrating being back together.
 

But the strain of the last five months is beginning to hit them, they told EWN.
“We’d kept it together, but it was like a wearing a shield and now we need time to relax,” said Marie.
Ian agrees.
“We need time out to take a break. We both feel drained by all the worry about the separation and everything else going on.
“And we need time to readjust to what is now the new normality of daily life.”

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Written by

Cathy Elelman

Cathy Elelman is the local writer for the Costa de Almeria edition of the Euro Weekly News.

Based in Mojacar for the last 21 years, Cathy is very much part of the local community and is always well and truly up on all the latest news and events going on in this region of Spain.

Her top goals are to do the best job she can informing the local English-speaking community, visitors to the area and the wider world about about the news in Almeria, to learn something new every day, and to embrace very new challenge this fast-changing world brings her way.

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