Honeymoon in Scotland

Title (Dublin Core)

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

After my husband and I were married in May of 2021 in our backyard with twenty vaccinated friends and family members, we planned to visit Scotland for our honeymoon as soon as possible. I can’t remember what the restrictions were like at that time, but having the vaccine made us both feel much more confident venturing out of our communities, which for me meant my job at a local coffee shop in Nashville and just a few, very close friends who were vaccinated and adhered to the recommended social distancing and masking practices. On our wedding night, we stayed at a hotel in downtown Nashville, wearing masks in all the common areas, and the next morning we had breakfast and returned home to our families who were in town for a couple more days.
I remember checking websites frequently to determine when we would be able to travel to Scotland. We refreshed the CDC, U.S., and U.K. government sites daily to see if our honeymoon could happen yet. At some point the websites revealed that travel was allowed again with the stipulations that first, we show our vaccination cards at the British Airways desk with our passports and tickets and second, we had to present negative test results before returning to the States. While it still felt like these rules could change any minute depending on case counts in either country, we took the risk and bought our tickets.
The time came for the trip, February, 2022, and getting out of the country went off without a hitch. The U.S. did not have an official app for storing vaccination card info like some other countries, but we found a third-party app called VeriFLY that was collaborating with British Airways to make confirming our vaccination status a tad bit quicker when checking into our flight at the airport. VeriFLY did as promised; our vaccinated statuses were confirmed in short order and we were on our way!
Now, I mentioned that we had to have a negative COVID test to return home. That reality colored our choices throughout that entire two-week trip. Sometimes that looked like attempting to take public transit at off-peak hours to avoid crowds. Londoners were still largely masked, but if I remember correctly it was no longer a requirement there, which certainly gave us some anxiety. We weren’t necessarily worried about COVID being really harmful to our bodies, though we miraculously hadn’t caught it in two years so we weren’t sure how it would affect us. Our anxieties were instead tied to being eligible to return home. I had been a barista since graduating from college in 2016 and my husband was a bartender and musician, so we were afraid of the extra financial burden of having to find a place to stay last minute, booking new flights, and buying food if we had to stay out of the country for another week or two.
In the pictures, even when we are outside, we frequently forget to remove our masks for the camera. There is a wonderful picture of my husband and I in front of Edinburgh Castle that would look so much better in a frame if our noses and mouths were visible. In contrast, there were other moments, like in a cozy speakeasy in New Town, Edinburgh, where the fears died down for a minute and we slipped the masks into our crossbody tourist bags. When a bookshelf opens up in the back of a fake barbershop that takes you down into a warmly lit basement with warm, low lighting and way more seating than you thought was possible, inhibitions fade and wonder takes over. Well, at least for my bartender husband and I.
That was the manner in which we traveled from London to Edinburgh, Bath, and back: masking when we couldn’t social distance except for a rare few cocktail bars, travelling between morning and evening rushes, and sanitizing our hands as frequently as possible. Besides jetlag in the beginning, we both felt healthy and well for the duration of the trip, but we had three more hurdles to overcome.
The last few days of our trip were spent in a neighborhood of London called Hackney-Wick where our AirBnB was a cozy, modern tiny home with an alley entrance. It was our favorite place we stayed the entire vacation. We arrived there very exhausted from our travels and eager for a few days of relaxation before the long trip home. Two days before our departure, however, Russia invaded Ukraine. We knew we were well out of harm’s way in England, but our relative proximity compared to our home in Tennessee made the exploding conflict feel much more imminent, especially when Boris Johnson made some bold comments about Vladimir Putin that week when nobody knew if Russia was prepared to make a larger attack. The last few nights in the AirBnB were a little less restful after that as we watched BBC around the clock for both COVID news and updates on the war.
There was one more stipulation about our negative test results - they had to be performed within 24 hours of boarding the plane. In a generally unfamiliar and exceedingly sprawling city with no knowledge of what pharmacies were more reputable than others and regardless desperate to get tested in that short window, we landed upon a small clinic that we would have to take the London Underground to and finally walk a couple blocks. I remember we showed up an hour before our appointments just to be on the safe side and the clinic was pretty quiet, so we stood around on the sidewalk still nervously checking BBC for anything new that could impact our travel. The tests were performed and we were assured there would be results in our inboxes sufficiently before takeoff, so we prayed that would be the case.