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Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Third Time's a Charm

April 2020--Our Easter sojourn to Scotland was snuffed only 8 days before we were to board the transatlantic flight.  Simply put, COVID shut the UK down.  Axing the plan to visit Neolithic Orkney was one of the "small" personal sacrifices the government assured us needed to be paid.  Altruistically, one for all, as it were.

"Small" is a relative word.  It's kind of like snowfall, in a way.  For example, a small snow in Idaho would be a 3 inch Category 5 winter storm in the Southeast.  

Sacrifice, however, is not.  We had to absorb (a fancy way of saying eat) a pocket full of prepaid travel costs for the 2020 Easter trip that didn't happen.  That loss was not exactly insignificant.  And travel insurance has its limitations...almost to the point that you'd be better off taking the hit.

It has been our experience (excepting 2020) that it is simpler to prepay most of the larger ticket items--like hotel stays, car rentals, train fare and so on--before leaving the United States for Scotland.  This method has eased some of the more bureaucratic parts of our trips...the check in stuff.  But the surety of having a room reserved and waiting after a full day of jumping trains, buses and ferry terminals has heretofore been worth the risk that our prepaid reservations may expire unused. 

Perhaps more importantly, we greatly lessen the amount of foreign cash we need to bring with us--which is gotten by giving a percentage to bank for the conversion privilege.  Stuff happens, so to speak.

Winter Solstice 2021:  Sunrise on "The W"

Once burned, twice shy.  Easter 2021, we made only halfhearted albeit repeated attempts to decipher the COVID travel code.  We'd look, but the writing was on the wall.  Even so, we still tried our hand at divining our future in airports.  Kind of a think tank prognostication about when, if ever, travel would open again.  It didn't in 2021.  

Christmas 2021 at "The W"
The most we could do last year was take the newly available Pfizer vaccines, get fully inoculated and maybe catch an eventual break on UK entry restrictions, like the UK requiring, among other things, a 10 day quarantine upon landing...all at a hefty expense to the traveler.  With only a two week visit to start with, that would amount to watching TV over there instead of over here.  Paying exorbitant fees for the privilege of being incarcerated in a quarantine hotel room just to watch snooker or darts an the telly hardly seemed worth the trade for MLB.  

So, we were bystanders from afar in 2021--observing temporarily canceled airline routes, shuttered pubs in Glasgow, folded up B&B's in the countryside, and castles and gardens gated to the public.  Nobody was going anywhere.  

Meanwhile, in snowy Idaho, we plotted our return...with warm thoughts on the ambition of Spring.  A tough year, 2021--one of isolation and (politically speaking) accusation.  Christmas '21 was a Zoom electronic affair.  But...hope springs eternal.

Getting the family together Christmas 2021
Two Easters have passed absent our Scotland pilgrimage.  It is now 2022.  It is said that the third time's a charm.  Perhaps it is.  We are venturing a return on our transatlantic sojourn to Alba...to Old Scotland.  We've been absent long enough, thank you very much.  And it now looks as if the UK has loosened up its travel restrictions.Probably none too late.

The BBC reported that at Glasgow International passengers declined from about 9 million in 2019 to 2 million by the end of 2021.  That is an enormous drop for Scotland's travel industry.  And with COVID seemingly now omnipresent, and mutated into being more a nuisance than a life and death sort of thing...we are giving the wheel of fortune another spin. 

For most purposes, our 2022 itinerary will be identical with the one we were "benevolently" forced to abandon in 2020.  There are some tweaks, though.  Originally the plan was to make room for a day and a half car rental in Thurso after landing from the Stromness ferry.  The plan was to tour north Caithness and the Wick coast.  That will have to wait for another time.

We "traded" the Thurso touring to make room for a longer visit of Orkney.  Specifically, we are considering an overnight or two on the Isle of Sanday.  That would be necessary to fully appreciate that north isle, which is about 12 miles in length.  Much will depend on how lenient the car rental folks are, whether they will permit the "car hire" to be taken onto the Orkney Ferries.  But those are details.  [Update: we were informed that we can indeed take the "hire" onto Orkney Ferries.  That greatly increases our mobility and range.]

Bottom line, we are set to return to our pilgrimage in Scotland, where the land meets the sea, and both meet the sky.