'To hell with it' – Quarantine is a farce but it won't ruin my holiday
Sitting outside the Hotel du Commerce this morning in the little hamlet of Bar-Sur-Seine, we sipped café and munched croissants in morning sunshine. I really did wonder what all the fuss was about.
Yesterday French airports were apparently rammed – making social distancing all but impossible. Eurostar was booked out. Extra ferry crossings were scheduled.
Britons desperate to avoid new quarantine restrictions were cutting short holidays (often paying exorbitant prices) to stampede home before it kicked in at 4am Saturday morning. At the same time we boarded a ferry at Dover and sailed in the opposite direction – for our much needed holiday in France.
There was no way I was abandoning it. We'd booked back in early July when Government communications were all about 'welcome back to holidays'.
Now they'd given just 30 hours' notice for the introduction of quarantine. That's hopelessly short for changing travel plans, particularly when the announcement comes at 10pm. We were due to leave at 7am next morning. What to do? Give up on our holiday and risk losing all our money too? No insurance policy covers you if you cancel in these circumstances. And frankly at that time of night it's not as if we could have contacted ferry company and accommodation providers to even discuss postponement
So to hell with it.
Quarantine is a complete pain, but we'll do it of course. My wife is a teacher. She really does need to be back and through quarantine before term restarts. So we found ourselves at midnight trying to find a foot passenger ferry ticket back to the UK. Midway through our holiday I'll have to drive seven hours each way from the Dordogne to put her on it to get her home whilst we continue our holiday without her.
But just as big an issue and often forgotten is invalidation of your travel insurance.
As soon as the Government imposes quarantine restrictions for a destination, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) travel advice changes to 'don't travel there unless it's essential'. At a stroke that means the vast majority of travel insurance policies are invalidated. This is nuts.
We need a far more pragmatic approach to travel insurance and FCO travel advice in these times. Do you have to write off a whole country on the basis that only certain areas have high levels of Covid-19? The Germans don’t think so. And travel insurers need to step up. I don’t expect cover for Covid if I choose to travel somewhere where it's possible I might catch it. But surely they could still cover me if someone steals my phone or I lose my luggage?
Large parts of France right now have low levels of coronavirus. We’re at less risk in Burgundy where we're bound for, than large parts of northern England. But the FCO has decided it's all too risky, as a result we're uninsured. Thankfully whilst we remain in the Brexit transition period, Brits retain the right to reciprocal emergency healthcare in France. I'm not sure I'd have been quite so gung ho otherwise.
So, here we are. And it's lovely. We've driven in dappled sunlight along long, straight roads fringed with shady woods and fields of shiny green grape vines. We've pootled through sleepy villages with tumble-down timber-framed buildings. Next we're visiting the historic 12th century Abbé de Fontenay. There are maybe 40 cars in a carpark that could hold a couple of hundred. And that's prefect. France without heaps of tourists is even better.
At some point today I'll call our travel insurer and cancel the policy we bought last week. There's a 14 day cooling off period when you can cancel with complete refund. There's not much use for it now.
