Hello! The temperatures in northeast Ohio have been frigid these last few days, but nothing like my friends in Maine are experiencing – windchill temperatures in the negative 40’s Fahrenheit – Yikes! We’ve been able to go out safely for walks with Pokey – as long as he is bundled up with a sweater AND a jacket, he’s been fine. It’s so important for me to be able to get out in the fresh air each day – I’m grateful the weather hasn’t been worse here.
I’ve been spending a lot of my free time since my last blog post coming up with my “22 for 2022” list to go along with my 2022 theme of “Joy.” I must say it has been a very enjoyable process, but I feel like the list still needs some tweaking. Nevertheless I am going to share it with you today, and over the next few posts I will elaborate on several of the items on my list (asterisked):
So, here it is, my 22 for 2022:
Buy fresh flowers once a week (or however long they last)
Play Wordle daily *
Keep the word “Joy” front and center in my life *
Visit my mother when I can, and sing with her
Buy one (traditional paper) book per month that I think will bring me joy, or help me contemplate joy *
Get my flute reconditioned and learn to play again *
Celebrate my 50th anniversary of being friends with Beth *
Nourish my body with healthy foods
Read every book Mary Oliver has written
Find ways to bring vibrant color into my life
Take a hike at least once a week, more often when the days are longer
Deliberately insert something that makes me laugh into each day *
Listen to one song each day that fills my heart with joy *
Take a moment each day to truly savor an experience *
Explore spirituality and what I actually think it means for me
Get a professional pedicure once a season
Get a monthly massage
Keep a Joy Journal *
Find 6 apps and/or podcasts that will help me add joy to my life *
Meditate daily *
London trip!
Try to brighten the day of at least one person each day *
Do you get excited by the fresh start the new year offers? Or do you see it as sort of arbitrary – really just another day? If you fall into the former camp, you probably enjoy making New Year’s resolutions, coming up with a one-word theme for the new year, or using the start of a new year as motivation to “clean house” in different aspects of your life. If you are in the latter camp, you probably say “meh” to all that. I have to admit that usually I’m in the first group. For the last two years I came up with one-word themes for my year (“Create” for 2020 and “Tend” for 2021) and compiled “20 for 2020” and “21 for 2021” lists of things I wanted to do each year. I love to put away all of the Christmas decorations on January 1st, do a deep clean of my house (well, sort of) and reorganize my closet. The start of the new year always feels shiny and full of potential for me.
This year I’ve been trying very hard to feel it, to get excited about what 2022 might hold for me, but “meh” has been winning out, I’m afraid. I think it’s partially due to Covid fatigue. Omicron is going through Ohio like wildfire. I’m working from home again, and I’m of two minds about that. I am very glad that my employer is responsible and cares about our health. But I grew to love working back in the office, particularly for the separation of “Work Michelle” and “Home Michelle” that it gave me, a la George Costanza – remember his worlds colliding theory? This second time around of working from home I definitely feel like my worlds are colliding.
Having said that, I refused to have “Meh” be my theme for 2022! So, I dug deeper, reading a variety of articles about the concept of the one-word theme, hoping to find some inspiration. I realized that part of what was holding me back was the fact that I am just feeling so emotionally fatigued and the idea of some theme that I have to manifest in my life just made me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. But then I came across this line in an article on the one-word theme: “If you want to choose a theme for 2022, start by asking a simple question: What’s the theme I need the most right now — based on what happened in 2021?”
Upon reading that sentence, I knew the answer instantly – my one-word theme for 2022 will be Joy.
Hello Friends! I love this Mary Oliver poem because it describes what nature does for me every time I let it – no matter what troubles are bubbling away in my brain, large or small, nature puts them all into perspective.
Last night Chris and I watched a movie called “Don’t Look Up”, which we really enjoyed (unfortunately Rotten Tomatoes critics and audiences did not agree, much to our surprise). The movie’s plot revolves around two astronomers who have discovered an enormous meteor that is on course to hit Earth with catastrophic results. They knock themselves out trying to get the government and the media and the people of the world to a) believe the science, and b) care.
Yep, it’s really about climate change.
We live in such a broken world. It’s always been broken of course, and I’m sure I’ve written about this before in this blog. I think what makes the brokenness of today’s world so frustrating to me is that now we know better. We have seen amazing advances in science over the last hundred years. We could do so much with this knowledge as a global community. And the US, with its enormous wealth and influence, could do so much to lead the way. And yet.
And yet.
The title of last night’s movie comes from the days after the meteor can finally be seen with the naked eye. The scientists and those who believe the scientists try to rally the world with the cry, “Look Up.” Of course, a certain faction of the country comes back with their own rallying cry, “Don’t Look Up.”
Did I mention the film is a comedy? Think Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove – there are definitely some elements of homage to Kubrick at work here.
I loved the film. But this morning my insides were all churned up. Not just by the whole science-denier thing going on with climate change and Covid. It was about the general broken nature of humans. As a race, you have to admit we’re pretty screwed up.
And yet.
I met some lovely people Friday evening. A family dealing with catastrophic illness, but handling it with great strength and grace. And also managing to get out in the world to advocate for better healthcare and a healthier environment.
Walking through the woods I remembered this family and all the other people around the world quietly doing the right thing, day after day. Then I stopped thinking and just focused on every little detail of the forest floor, hunting for fungi, listening to the woodpeckers. I looked up and saw a stone with a Christmas tree painted on it nestled between a split trunk of a tree – a gift from some stranger that I left for some other stranger to find.
I have no parting shot with which to wrap up this blog post. I have no answers to the problems of humanity. All I know is that many people are good. Many people are trying to do the right thing. And nature heals.
I’ve been writing a blog post all week – about the shorter days, the darkness, how it affects me and how I’m trying to accept it and maybe even embrace it – but I just can’t get it right (although I do have a great poem on darkness by Wendell Berry). So here I am instead with some photos and a little update.
Thanksgiving weekend was a quiet affair – Chris made this incredible dish and we watched “tick, tick…BOOM!” twice in a row, it was that good. The music of the late Jonathan Larson just fills my soul with joy. Here is a link to a trailer for the film, and here is a link to my favorite song from the musical. Such beauty. And such an incredibly talented artist who left us way too soon.
I’ve been plowing through the Chief Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny – maybe if I spent a little less time with Armand Gamache and a little more time working on my writing I’d get further with that blog post! I do love the series, though. Seventeen books! What an absolute embarrassment of riches! It’s fun to be reading through the series at the same time as Chris and my dear friend Beth. Beth and I are both about 8 books into the series, while Chris is on book one and gaining.
Chris and I binge-watched the sixth season of Shetland over the last several days – such a great series, initially based on the Shetland series of novels by Ann Cleeves (and now inspired by said novels). Ann Cleeves also wrote the Vera Stanhope novel series that has inspired its own television series, Vera. We love both shows. I never thought I’d be such a fan of murder mysteries. I really don’t like anything too dark – but series like Gamache, Shetland, and Vera are really more character study than murder. The murder investigation seems to be a vehicle for showing us different aspects of the characters.
Work is just the right amount of busy at the moment, and will be too busy soon, but it’s all good. There have been a few Covid near misses (possible exposures) and a couple direct hits (coworkers actually coming down with it) in the last several weeks, but I wear my mask religiously, don’t leave my cubicle unless I have to, and hope for the best. I also got my booster!
Christmas is coming! Last year I did all sorts of baking and drying of fruit and making of homemade ornaments and gifts. This year is going to be considerably more low-key. No tree this year because I just don’t feel like spending most of my energy keeping Pokey from destroying it, but I have decked the halls a bit. Christmas cards were sent out and reached their recipients (at least the US recipients) so quickly it seemed to me like some kind of Christmas magic. I’m collecting some recipes for making yummy goodies for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (I seem to be strongly drawn to puff pastry and bought a couple boxes at the grocery store today in case there’s a run on puff pastry closer to the holiday).
I’ll continue working on that post about winter’s darkness and will have it to you soon (as long as Armand cooperates)!
The photos above are sort of random, but are loosely organized. On Monday of our week together Chris and I drove to the southern coast for a two-day visit with family and friends-who-are-family. The photos here were taken at Beachy Head and Bexhill on Sea. We also spent a very rainy Wednesday exploring Regents Park, including Queen Mary’s Garden – which has the most amazing array of different varieties of roses. It’s at its peak in the summer, of course, but I was so happy to see many of the roses still thriving. The rest of the photos were just snapped whenever I thought, “Oh, that’s cool,” or “Now THAT’S British”, lol.
It was fun sharing my trip with you. I’m already looking forward to my next trip to the UK, hopefully in October, 2022.
Hampstead is an urban village that is about 4 miles northwest of Charing Cross (which is considered the center of London). The average house price in Hampstead last year was 1,668,840 British pounds ($2,224,413 US), and the average rental price is 2,045 pounds per WEEK (about $2,728). It’s considered quite “posh”, so when I called it “our” neighborhood in my post yesterday it kind of made me laugh, because this is not quite our natural habitat. But we love having it as our base of operations when we are in the UK.
Chris stays in Hampstead when he works in London mainly because it is within walking distance of the two main recording studios in London – Abbey Road Studios and Air Lyndhurst Studios. He has always stayed in the same small hotel – LaGaffe – where the front desk for the Italian restaurant of the same name is about 5 steps away from the front desk for the hotel rooms located above. LaGaffe is decidedly NOT posh. It is cozy and quaint and the people who work there are wonderful and welcoming. Chris is treated like family there, and there’s nothing more comforting for him after 10 hours in the studio than spaghetti bolognese and a glass of wine downstairs followed by falling into a coma in his room upstairs.
On my last day in the UK, we decided that we would take it easy and just do a gentle wander through Hampstead. I did want some traditional scones, jam, and clotted cream, though, and when Googling “best scones in Hampstead” I ran across this blog describing a pleasant afternoon spent having tea and scones at Burgh House, so we decided to start our day with breakfast there. Burgh House is an historic house that is run as an independent arts-centered charity serving the community of Hampstead. They have a cafe with both indoor and outdoor seating, some rooms set up as a museum of Hampstead history, some rooms furnished as they would have been in the house’s heyday, and some rooms fashioned as galleries for shows of local artists. After Chris and I had coffee and scones in their cafe we explored the house.
I had another location I wanted to find in Hampstead – the source of the River Tyburn, one of Londons “lost rivers” and an important character in the Rivers of London series of books by Ben Aaronovitch. Yes, a river is a character in these books – but it’s not what you might imagine. Chris and I both enjoyed the series immensely, and our friend Beth introduced us to the series, so she was excited when I told her I was going to search out some locations important to the books during my trip. The plaque showing the approximate location of the Tyburn’s source was a bit overgrown with vines (the more accurate location is in the middle of the adjacent busy road – not a good place for a historical plaque) so I really felt like we found buried treasure when we found it!
For lunch I was in the mood for a crepe, and I had heard of a freestanding crepe stand called La Creperie de Hampstead. It is famous in the area for its crepes, has been in operation for 40 years, and it stands outside the King William IV pub on Hampstead’s Main Street. I approached what I thought was La Creperie de Hampstead and ordered a spinach, cheese, and sun-dried tomato crepe. Then I looked around while my crepe was being made. Not 5 yards away stood the ACTUAL La Creperie de Hampstead; I was getting a crepe from plain old “La Creperie”, an IMPOSTER! There was a sign outside the real La Creperie de Hampstead saying “This is the only creperie in Hampstead we operate.” It really should have said – “Look out! The guy next door is an imposter!” I felt bad getting my crepe from the interloper (and later found out the history behind this War of the Crepes here), but in the end, I do have to report that my crepe was pretty darn delicious.
Next we got coffee from a newer fixture in Hampstead – a coffee vendor who operates out of an old iconic red British phone booth. I wish I had taken a photo of his very efficient operation, but for some reason I was too shy to ask him if I could have a photo. I’m not sure why – I know he probably would have been thrilled to have me publicize his business to my many readers. 🙂
The evening turned rainy and we walked only a block away from La Gaffe for my going-away dinner – steaks at an Argentinian restaurant called Gaucho. We ate early and had an entire corner of the dining room to ourselves. I had a filet, Chris had a sirloin; we both had spinach and chips (fries). We were both too full for dessert. Ooof. We walked through the drizzly Hampstead streets to work off our meal.
The next day I traveled back to Ohio and Chris stayed on to finish the last week or so of his job.
Tomorrow I will post some random photos from the trip. We went some places that I decided not to devote entire blog posts to, but I’d still like to share the images with you.
The Thursday of my week in the UK Chris and I walked over 24,000 steps.
Our original itinerary was:
Leadenhall Market for coffee and pastries
Walk across London Bridge
Borough market for brunch/lunch
Walk along the Thames to the Tate Modern art museum so that I could pick up a t-shirt in the gift shop for the daughter of a friend
Shopping on Oxford Street so that I could get a certain coffee mug I wanted that could only be found at a store called John Lewis (coffee mugs are a weakness of mine, and all I wanted as a souvenir of this trip was this coffee mug)
Self-guided tour of Westminster Abbey and Evensong
Dinner at 7:30 in Soho with Chris’ brother and sister-in-law and our nephew Steve and his fiancé.
It was an ambitious list.
I can’t remember how I found out about Leadenhall Market, but I was proud to have found a place in London that Chris had never heard about. It’s a covered market (celebrating its 700th anniversary this year) with restaurants and upscale shops. I really just wanted to visit it to admire the architecture, which is stunning, but then I found out that there was a bakery there (link here) that specializes in meringues. I have a thing for meringues. I needed to go there. Luckily they also serve coffee.
From Leadenhall Market we wandered in a southerly direction, crossing over the Thames on London Bridge and ending up at Borough Market, one of my very favorite places in London. I wrote this post a while back about a fabulous day I spent in 2013 with my friends Dave and Sarah – buying all sorts of things at Borough Market and having not one, but two picnics in different locations in London. That was a great day. On this particular day, though, I really only wanted two things – a beef and vegetable pasty (for my non-British readers, pasty information here) and a meringue as big as my head. I got my pasty, but was heartbroken to find that the head-sized-meringue-selling-bakery-stand was no longer there. So I had fudge instead – not the smooth, creamy sort of fudge we’re used to in the States. This is a fudge that has origins in the Devon region of the UK and it is crumbly and firm but melts in your mouth. Looooooovely. I was able to pick my own little bagful of fudge chunks with a pair of tongs – ginger, orange-chocolate, clotted cream, salted caramel. My broken heart, it turns out, was easily mended.
Around 2:00 we had a re-think of our situation. We were both getting tired. We had a firm 7:30 time when we had to end up at a certain restaurant in the Soho section of the city, which meant that we had 5 1/2 more hours of walking around. We decided to get my coffee mug at John Lewis, take the Tube back to our hotel, and chill out for a couple of hours before heading back downtown for dinner. It was easy for me to cut out Westminster Abbey – I had already been a few years ago for both the self-guided tour and Evensong. I knew that Westminster Abbey was more my idea than Chris’. I also knew that after I left him on Saturday Chris had 8 days in a row of a very punishing recording schedule (he ended up working 82 hours during that timeframe) and I didn’t want him to start that 8 day stretch already worn out. We had already decided that the next day, my final day in the UK, we would just casually explore “our” neighborhood of Hampstead.
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating the day! I will be back tomorrow with my Hampstead post and over the weekend I will finish by posting a bunch of random photos I took during the week.
Love,
Michelle xoxo
P.S. Dave, you’re right – I should have shown the mug! It’s by Emma Bridgewater Pottery, made in Stoke-on-Trent. She had a real moment about 10 years ago – there used to be EB stores all over London, but all the London stores are now closed and now John Lewis is the only place I found her pottery in London. It may not still be in vogue, but I still love it.
What can I say – I’m starstruck every single time I walk through the doors of Abbey Road Studios. That makes it sound like it’s a frequent occurrence, but I’ve only been there about a handful of times to watch Chris work. When he’s working in London, it’s either at Abbey Road or Air Lyndhurst Studios. During this particular project, they recorded in both studios over the course of a month, but during the time I was there, they were at Abbey Road.
I can’t say much about the particular project Chris was working on yet, as he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and while it would probably be OK for me to tell you a little bit about the project, I’d rather be on the safe side and say nothing specific at the moment – when the film comes out I will tell all! But I can tell you that the composer Chris works with most often is just an incredible person who always treats me with such warmth and kindness. The entire team always makes me feel welcome. I’m so glad Chris works with these people.
When I visit I usually sit on one of the two couches in the control room of Studio One, trying to be very still and very quiet. Studio One is the biggest of the studios at Abbey Road, so it is the one used for large orchestral recordings. Studio Two is the most famous of the studios, and it is where The Beatles recorded.
Just like a film script is filmed scene by scene, the movie score is also recorded scene by scene. There are computer monitors in the control booth so that the composer can see the scene while the orchestra plays the music for that scene. Which means that I got to watch the scenes too. It really was thrilling. Which is why I tried to make myself very small and quiet and not piss anybody off, lol.
Because of Covid, they had to make a lot of adjustments to their usual routine. They never had a full orchestra in the studio at one time the way they usually would. Instead they would have a day or two with just strings, and then a day or two with just brass, and so on – which made it possible to have social distancing in place, and which was the reason the score took nearly a month to record instead of the usual 10 days or so. When they record a choir they usually would have between 60 and 80 singers – for this project they had 20, and just recorded them several times over again to make it sound like a full-sized choir. Everyone involved in the recording also had to be tested for Covid every three days. Usually Chris sits with his equipment in the control booth, but for this film he had to work on a table behind the conductor’s stand.
During this trip I saw part of a session with strings on Saturday (sitting in the control booth) and part of a session with brass on Sunday (sitting with Chris in the studio with the musicians). Although it was cool watching snippets of the movie before anyone else in the world did (except for the thousands of people working on the film, lol), what I loved the most about the entire experience was actually being in the room with world-class musicians, watching them work and hearing them create music with the type of effortlessness and grace that only comes with an entire lifetime of hard work and practice.
When you’re traveling alone you need to be prepared. You also need to be unafraid of asking questions of perfect strangers. My first day in London I would give myself a C+ on the former and an A+ on the latter. More on this later in the post.
My flight arrived at London’s Heathrow airport at 6:25am Saturday morning. I was able to get some sleep on the plane and was feeling tired but alert. I had already bought round trip tickets on the Heathrow Express – an over-the-ground train that goes directly from Heathrow to Paddington Station. At the airport I also bought a Tube one day pass from a kiosk.
When I got to Paddington Station I knew I had to find a way to get to the Northern Line – the only line that lets off at Hampstead station, which was about a quarter mile from our hotel. So what did I do? I consulted a map of the Tube on the wall. On first glance, the map of the Tube looks like so much colorful spaghetti, but it’s actually a marvel of design. It’s a stylized map, originally created in 1931 by a man named Harry Beck. It’s really more a diagram than an actual map, as the location of the stops on the map are not strictly geographically correct. The design has been tweaked over the years (an interesting history of the map can be found here), but the spirit of the original map remains the same as it did in the early 1930’s.
So, there I was in Paddington station, looking at the map. I could see that if I took the Circle Line going East I could hook up with the Northern Line at King’s Cross St. Pancras station (not to be confused with King’s Cross station, where students from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry board the Hogwarts Express – actually, I’m still confused – I think King’s Cross St. Pancras is the name of the Tube station and King’s Cross is the actual above-ground train station – please correct me if I’m wrong, London readers, but I digress…Ahem. Once I found out my route from the map, the rest was easy peasy. The SIGNAGE, you see, in the London Tube is amazingly user-friendly (hear that, JFK Airport?). There are clear, easy to read, color-coded signs showing you exactly how to get where you need to go. I especially love the “Way Out” signs – they just make me smile. Although synonymous with “Exit”, “Way Out” just seems so much more friendly, don’t you think? Also, as the train reaches each new station, a voice announces the station and the connections at that station – at the same time that an LED banner sign on both sides of each car streams the same information.
And the beauty of it all? Even if you screw up and go in the wrong direction, or get off at the wrong stop, you can just get back on going in the opposite direction and get back on the right track (pun intended).
So, I got off at Hampstead, checked in at our hotel, took a shower, changed clothes, and got right back out there. I knew that if I hung around the room too long I would be in danger of getting sleepy and taking a nap. So off I went! First stop, Covid test. I had made an appointment for 1:00, but stopped by at about 10:30 and asked if I could take the test early. Yep! Next, something to eat. I stopped at a cafe with outdoor seating because the sign outside advertising their crepes caught my eye (because what do you have for your first meal in London, but crepes – lol). Next I found my way to Hampstead Heath and started walking. And sitting on benches just absorbing nature. The weather was beautiful – cloudy and cool but not cold. The trails were a bit muddy in places, but not too bad. I just kind of took one path after another, wandering to my heart’s content, taking photos of birds and trees. I really wished that I had brought my “real” camera, because so many of the birds were completely foreign to me (Eurasian Coot; Ringed Neck Parakeet, which is non-native and so surprising to see – photo from elsewhere on the internet here; and the Eurasian magpie, among others). It being early Saturday afternoon, there were many people walking the paths, but I still found places that felt remote. If you’d like to learn more about Hampstead Heath, here is the official website, and here is a fan site – which I enjoy so much more than the official site. I also love that a park has a fan site.
Rambling along, I suddenly remembered that I had arranged to meet Chris at Abbey Road Studios at 3:30. He had a break around that time and would be able to come get me in reception and bring me back to Studio One, where he was working. Around that time I looked at my cell phone and realized that it was dead. I had packed a charging brick, and I had put it in my handbag, but did I also put the charging cord in there? Of course not. Hence my C+ in planning. So, I wasn’t quite sure what time it was – I could have been wandering one hour or two and a half hours; I had completely lost track of time. I knew I had to make my way back to the hotel so that I could charge my phone and then head down to Abbey Road. After a couple of minutes I saw a path ending at a city street, so I took it – but it was not the same path upon which I had entered. So, I looked for a place to ask for help. A dry cleaners! Perfect! I went in and asked the woman behind the counter how I might make my way back to Hampstead. Turns out I had completely cut across the Heath and was now on the opposite side – I could either try to navigate my way back across the park, or if I walked 10 minutes down the street I would be at a Tube station on the Northern Line. If I had all the time in the world I would have rambled on back across Hampstead Heath, but time being of the essence I walked to the station.
Next post – Abbey Road!
Michelle xoxo
PS – In case you’re wondering what kind of crepe I had – ham and cheese 🙂
So, international travel in the time of Covid. It’s different. And the same.
Cleveland Hopkins airport is technically an international airport, but their international direct-flight offerings are quite limited (Canada, Mexico, Bahamas, Dominican Republic), so in the past I’ve flown to London via Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago. This time I flew via JFK airport in New York, in my opinion the most confusing airport ever designed. Signage, people! Travelers need frequent, easy to read signage! When I landed in JFK, the departures monitor did not show a gate number for my next flight. When I asked a random gate agent how I could find out my gate, she looked at my ticket and said, “Oh, you’re flying with British Airways! You’ll have to go to Terminal 7. To get there you will need to go on the AirTrain. You see that corridor down there off to the right? Go down there until you see TSA and then you’ll see a sign for the AirTrain.” I should note right here that there was no overhead or otherwise signage saying anything to the effect of “This way to Terminal 7” or “This way to the AirTrain”. None. A nice gentleman from my first flight, without much English language under his belt, apparently had the same issue as me, overheard my conversation with the agent, and decided to become my travel buddy. We followed the agent’s directions and found…no signs to Terminal 7. So I asked a security guard. He sent us further on our way. As did another random airport worker a little bit further along. We finally reached the AirTrain, along with a college-aged young woman frantically talking to her parents on her cell phone about how lost she was, and – I kid you not – a flight crew who sort-of had an idea where we were going. A nice lady on the platform at the AirTrain then told us which doors would actually open when the AirTrain arrived. When I reached Terminal 7 I realized that I had left the secure part of the airport and had to go through security again. You just have to laugh!
This semi-rant about missing or inadequate signage becomes important for a later blog post, my love letter to the London Underground, known as The Tube.
So, back to traveling in the time of Covid. I can’t give any specific travel guidance as the requirements of every country are unique. I can just tell you what my experience traveling to the UK was, which will give you somewhat of a feeling for it.
You’re no doubt accustomed to traveling with some form of ID and perhaps a visa. Traveling nowadays requires a bit more documentation than that. In order to fly to the UK from the United States (and avoid quarantine upon arrival) I had to show proof of my vaccination status – the actual card, not a picture taken on my phone. One of Chris’ coworkers on the job he’s doing now thought he just needed a photo of the card. Nope. He was not allowed to fly until he could produce the card. British Airways (and so I presume other airlines as well) does have an App called Verifly that I did not know about on my way over. With Verifly you can upload all of your documentation ahead of time and then just show the App status to the ticketing agents when you check in. I used Verifly on my way back home and while it wasn’t highly intuitive to upload all of my stuff, I did figure it out eventually. And it saved me a lot of pulling out paperwork in the airport.
So, vaccination status was needed to enter the UK, as well as a very detailed passenger locator form. On the form I had to show proof that I had scheduled and paid for a Covid test within the first 2 days of my arrival in the UK. If this all sounds a bit overwhelming, I do have to say that the British government has a very easy-to-use website for international travelers, which has links to government approved testing sites throughout the country. I found one just down the road from my hotel, and went for my test the day I arrived.
Returning to the States, I needed to take a Covid test within 3 days of my flight back and provide proof of a negative test. If I was unlucky and had a positive test? I would have had to stay in the UK ten more days. It was a bit of a nail biter, because although being in London another 10 days sounds great, being quarantined in a London hotel room for 10 days does not. Along with explaining to my boss that I wouldn’t be able to finish that project I was planning to finish upon my return. Luckily, my test was negative. Phew!
So, why risk international travel right now? At this point in my Covid career I feel like I’ve done all I can to minimize the risk to myself and others by becoming fully vaccinated, wearing masks anytime I’m indoors around people, or outdoors in crowded circumstances. When the opportunity came up to join Chris in the UK during his break from work, I knew this was not an opportunity I wanted to miss. We needed the time together as a couple. And frankly, I needed a break from my everyday life.
Plus, I looked at the numbers. In Ohio right now, we have just reached 65.7% of Ohioans over 12 years old having their 1st dose of the vaccine. In England, 88% of the population over 12 are fully vaccinated. I’m actually more likely to run into someone capable of infecting me right here in my very conservative-leaning hometown. Or in my workplace, where not everyone is vaccinated and mask wearing adherence is not always perfect (I’m talking to you, nose-exposers!) A case could actually be made for, “Michelle, why would you expose those poor Brits to your Ohio-based immune system?”
So, testing – I was tested twice in the space of 5 days (at my own expense, of course!). Masks – mask-wearing was mandatory on all public transportation, from when I entered Cleveland airport to when I left the Tube station near my hotel. I was lucky that both of my flights in both directions were not full and I always had an empty seat next to me. And I only encountered one “arsehole” on the entire trip – a twenty-something drunk male who refused to wear his mask on the flight from London to Philadelphia. I’m not sure what the outcome of that was – the flight attendants (who deserve medals, all of them!) dealt with him calmly and quietly.
Hand sanitizer – I had to travel by air a couple of times when I was in treatment for cancer and had asked my oncologist at the time if I should wear a mask. I will never forget what she told me. She said that the biggest threat to me was not airborne but was on the extremely filthy surfaces in airports and airplanes. Now, I know that these days surface disinfection is quite rigorous (or should be!), but still I wiped down the armrests, tray, etc upon taking any seat in the airport or on the plane. I do realize that Covid is primarily an airborne threat, but I also am of the “it can’t hurt” mindset for taking precautions.
I had a great time in the UK and will tell you all about it in the next few posts, which I will write this week!
I do have a couple of recommendations if you are traveling long distances during this pandemic. First, wearing a mask for upwards of 12 hours is reaaaaaallllly uncomfortable on the ears. I wish I would have bought one of the many products out there for protecting your ears when wearing a mask. There are an amazing array of them if you go on Amazon or Etsy (look at the clever ones here, here, and here) . Do yourself a favor – get one. My second recommendation is to buy a combination passport/immunization card holder. You can get one for less than $10 (like this one) and it gave me quite a bit of peace of mind knowing that my immunization card was protected from wear-and-tear and was also easily accessed.
Ok, my friends! I will put this post to bed and start my next one – that love letter to the Tube that I mentioned earlier. 🙂
