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When I was growing up, I was under the impression that there’s a certain moment in life where you suddenly transform into a Real Actual Adult that instinctively schedules yearly dental examinations, knows how stocks work, and changes the sheets before they start to smell.
However, as someone who’s steadily approaching the age of 30 who still does not do any of those things, I’ve learned that growing up is a gradual process and everyone matures at their own rate. With that said, in my experience, your 25th birthday is the point where you realize you’re officially getting old and you subsequently make a concerted effort to get your shit together and take life a little more seriously.
It’s usually around that point that a bunch of people you know start to get engaged. When my friends did, I was obviously happy for them at the time but I was much less happy when I received invitations to four weddings in three months and realized this was the first time my parents weren’t paying for me to go.
That shit adds up, and as a result, I couldn’t tell you the last time I went on a trip that didn’t require me to pack a suit. Thankfully, last fall marked the last nuptial I’ll be attending for the foreseeable future and gave me time to take a breather and save some cash for a destination of my choosing.
After examining the options, I booked a flight down to Tampa for WrestleMania, which is where I’d be going next weekend if it wasn’t for a global health panic. Instead, I get to sit in my apartment some more. Fun!
As of right now, you can technically sequester yourself in a confined space for hours on end with strangers of unknown origin, as the United States has declined to ban people from exercising their right to make poor decisions.
However, that can’t be said for Peru, whose government declared a state of emergency earlier this month that resulted in Jorge Chávez International Airport—the country’s largest—grounding all flights and stranding around 300 Americans who suddenly found themselves stuck in South America.
It turns out Aaron Rodgers was almost one of those people, as the Packers quarterback chatted with Pat McAfee and A.J. Hawk last week and revealed he barely managed to make it off of the tarmac in time after his vacation in Peru was unexpectedly cut short (if YouTube doesn’t cooperate, the conversation starts around the 7:00 mark):
Here’s how he said things went down:
“Have you seen the movie ‘Argo’?’
The scene at the end where they’re racing to the airport. Nobody was chasing us, thankfully, or holding us. We didn’t have to speak Farsi to get back into the country, but there were some moments where we worried we were not going to get out. It was absolute pandemonium at the airport.”
When we rolled up to the airport at, like, seven in the morning, it was wall-to-wall people, and you couldn’t move. I was thinking, ‘This isn’t very safe.’ Not many masks on, and there was definitely a panic in the air.
But somehow [we] made it down, and then they shut the airport down because it was really bad weather. They had a drop-dead time where they were going to shut the entire airport down. We made it by about 15 minutes.”
Rodgers did have a slight edge on the aforementioned travelers who were left behind because he was flying private, and during the interview, he said he’d been texting with someone connected to the Pentagon before the daring escape, so he probably would’ve been fine if he hadn’t made it out on time.
It’s definitely a bummer he had to leave Peru prematurely but he’s apparently now chilling in a beach house on the West Coast so I think he’ll survive.