Holiday plans
Jul. 11th, 2020 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe - by which I mean I, because I'm the one who plans holidays - had two holidays planned for this year. That was Before - in fact it was last year - but some of the news is positive.
Firstly, we had already accepted D.'s invitation to help him celebrate a significant birthday with a houseparty at Auchinleck House, a Landmark Trust mansion in the south of Scotland. A sub-group of that party would then proceed to spend a few more days on the Isle of Bute. I had vague thoughts about stopovers on the way there and back, but this much was fixed well in advance. Restrictions for Scotland are gradually being lifted, and over the last few weeks it has been looking more and more possible that some of this celebration will actually happen: and we have now crossed a threshhold at which the number of people still able to participate no longer exceeds the number of people permitted to gather together indoors. There will be some absences, and I am scaling back ideas of extending the week's break by spending a couple of days exploring on the way there (maybe on the way back?), but some sort of holiday will - barring eventualities, of course - happen.
My other plan was to spend some time in France: for two years running we had taken our holidays in the UK, not because of any plan but just because it had that was how thingshad worked out. This includes two trips to the Northern Isles and a happy week at the seaside with Bears, and I'm not complaining, but we hadn't been in France since a few days in Brittany tacked on to a trip to London, and if not now, when? I wanted to visit Provence, where we have not been for years because it is such a long drive, and had come to the conclusion that pleasant though it is to take the car and fill it with wine, better to go by train than not to go at all. There's a Eurostar direct to Avignon or Nîmes, you don't even have to negotiate Paris, hira a car at the other end and explore - and I was browsing the Michelin green guide and the Routard guide to France when lockdown happened and all bets were off. But we were planning for September or October, and maybe by then ...?
Well, maybe. The more confident I feel about traveling to France, the less likely it seems that France will want to welcome the plague-stricken English (and yes, I mean Englidh). Boris's talk of air bridges just sets me off on another rant, of which the short version is I thought we had fallen out of love with air travel?, and although he doesn't actually mean that it only applies to air travel (when did Boris ever actually mean what he says?), Eurostar have announced that they will not be running the direct train to the south.
Too early to plan for that now, I think. There are, as the Guardian reminds us, less touristy areas of France (with recommendations for hotels in the Auvergne); sorting out photos from previous years reminds me how much I liked Brittany; and there are still trains via Paris - or, indeed, Lille - if we stick to Plan A.
This post has been a process of thinking aloud, and I appreciate that it's not very interesting to anyone but me. My apologies; will try to do better next time.
Firstly, we had already accepted D.'s invitation to help him celebrate a significant birthday with a houseparty at Auchinleck House, a Landmark Trust mansion in the south of Scotland. A sub-group of that party would then proceed to spend a few more days on the Isle of Bute. I had vague thoughts about stopovers on the way there and back, but this much was fixed well in advance. Restrictions for Scotland are gradually being lifted, and over the last few weeks it has been looking more and more possible that some of this celebration will actually happen: and we have now crossed a threshhold at which the number of people still able to participate no longer exceeds the number of people permitted to gather together indoors. There will be some absences, and I am scaling back ideas of extending the week's break by spending a couple of days exploring on the way there (maybe on the way back?), but some sort of holiday will - barring eventualities, of course - happen.
My other plan was to spend some time in France: for two years running we had taken our holidays in the UK, not because of any plan but just because it had that was how thingshad worked out. This includes two trips to the Northern Isles and a happy week at the seaside with Bears, and I'm not complaining, but we hadn't been in France since a few days in Brittany tacked on to a trip to London, and if not now, when? I wanted to visit Provence, where we have not been for years because it is such a long drive, and had come to the conclusion that pleasant though it is to take the car and fill it with wine, better to go by train than not to go at all. There's a Eurostar direct to Avignon or Nîmes, you don't even have to negotiate Paris, hira a car at the other end and explore - and I was browsing the Michelin green guide and the Routard guide to France when lockdown happened and all bets were off. But we were planning for September or October, and maybe by then ...?
Well, maybe. The more confident I feel about traveling to France, the less likely it seems that France will want to welcome the plague-stricken English (and yes, I mean Englidh). Boris's talk of air bridges just sets me off on another rant, of which the short version is I thought we had fallen out of love with air travel?, and although he doesn't actually mean that it only applies to air travel (when did Boris ever actually mean what he says?), Eurostar have announced that they will not be running the direct train to the south.
Too early to plan for that now, I think. There are, as the Guardian reminds us, less touristy areas of France (with recommendations for hotels in the Auvergne); sorting out photos from previous years reminds me how much I liked Brittany; and there are still trains via Paris - or, indeed, Lille - if we stick to Plan A.
This post has been a process of thinking aloud, and I appreciate that it's not very interesting to anyone but me. My apologies; will try to do better next time.
