Revising The Plan!

 The One Way Road Out of Lockdown?

As the year has progressed so far, two things have become clearer than they were on 1st January. One is that within the UK there is a reasonable chance of something like a normal summer with holidays as usual, so our planned trip to the south coast and to Scotland are looking more sure than I had hitherto hoped.

The other is that travel will not be a great deal freer until the end of June, and international travel remains an enigma because we cannot predict how the pandemic will progress in other countries whose vaccine programmes have not been as swift as our own. So our hoped-for trip to Switzerland in June is looking so unlikely that I have stopped planning for it and will revise my schedule to put it back to next June instead (it was already postponed from 2020). There is still some hope that Italy in the autumn and Germany next winter will be possible if the vaccination programmes in all the relevant countries proceed well, and I shall work on the assumption that these trips are on.

It is looking like the proposed group tour to Cambridge in July can go ahead, provided that the train service has resumed something like normal operation by then, and we can start day and short-stay trips within England in July, too. There will probably be some excursions by car before we can resume rail adventures, but we'll try to make those to places not on "The List". Places like the Thermae Bath Spa are unlikely to open before rail travel becomes available anyway.

Now, then, to plan some more rail adventures to try to make up for lost time: it was always going to be a race to get everything done while still fit and well, and now we have to stay fit and well for two more years to get it all in!