I’ve spent the last six weeks in the United Kingdom, largely because I ran out of places to go. In the summer, when travel first started to open back up, I didn’t want to plan in the near term — things were still new and just recovering — and I didn’t want to plan in the far term — winter remained frightening and unpredictable — so I ended up planning a massive amount of stuff in the medium term from September to November. Beyond that I had booked a flight to be in the United Kingdom¹ and … nothing else.

I eventually acquired an end date and a return ticket to the United States just after the New Year, but I still didn’t have a clue what I was going to do after I landed. I knew I was heading to a friend’s place, and I expected to stay there for about a week, but I had no idea what to do beyond that.

There’s a kind of romantic ideal of travel where you wake up, hop in a car, and decide where to go on the spur of the moment. And I can see the appeal. But it’s just not for me, not in the long run. I get too anxious not knowing where I’m going to sleep that night or if the thing I really wanted to see is going to be sold out.

At the same time, we’re in a particularly tumultuous period. I was here for about ten days before Omicron was announced, and the next three weeks saw it blow up holiday plans the world over.² By then I had arrived at the Orkney islands³ and was in the process of trying to figure out where to be until I flew back to the United States. I was able to adjust my plans because they weren’t finalized, avoiding population centers and large groups of people, in a way that usually isn’t possible for me.

But there’s no denying there’s a level of fear. In retrospect, now that we know how contagious Omicron is, would I have made the same travel choices? Some of them, yes. All of them, no. If I had the option to hunker down for four weeks with friends and see how things played out would I have done it? Very possibly. But I didn’t have that choice, and given how badly the last holiday season went for me, when I was alone and locked down, I sized up the known knowns and the known unknowns and made my choices. And now here we are.

For me, the past month has meant a lot of road trips. I started, pre-Omicron, with a weekend trip around Wales. My friend drove⁴ and I mostly pointed to places I wanted to see. For the first couple days that was the Ring of Iron, the castles built in the late 1200s by Edward I as part of the pacification of Wales.⁵ I toured Caernarfon, Harlech, and Conwy — Conwy’s the pretty one, Caernarfon’s the serious one⁶ — and they’re all within a couple hour’s drive from one another.⁷

But the best part for me was Portmeirion Village, the utterly bonkers faux Italianate seaside resort known as the shooting location for The Prisoner. I was a huge fan of The Prisoner when I discovered it in the early ‘w90s, and when I realized I was going to be in the area I looked up the resort and managed to book a halfway affordable room for the night.⁸

I didn’t quite understand what I had actually booked until we drove in to the site. We first discovered the hotel was literally located in the Village, and upon arriving there were handed keys to “The Prior’s Lodging” a cozy and recently refurbished room not in the hotel but directly underneath the bell tower in the village. Or rather, the Village.

It was hard to keep from gleefully giggling while walking out of the room to pass by the fountain and the chessboard on the way to dinner. I realize the appeal of Portmeirion is probably limited to a particular kind of sci-fi geek at this point⁹ but there’s something almost stupefyingly magical about being able to wander those paths and wend your way through those archways and porticoes. But unlike, say, Rise of the Resistance or The Wizarding World of Harry Potter¹⁰ Portmeirion is actually a real place¹¹ that existed before Patrick MacGoohan showed up and it still exists now which makes it particularly special, to me.

The other major road trip I undertook was a grand, eleven-day perambulation across northern England. This was largely planned out when Omicron was A Thing™ but before the impact or severity was known; I figured loading myself in a rental car and sticking to small towns away from crowds was a reasonable accommodation to the uncertainty.¹² I booked a car out of Glasgow and traveled in a large circle, from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne,¹³ down the east coast of England past Newcastle upon Tyne, across to Cumbria, and finally back to Glasgow.

I’m getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road¹⁴ and I’ve never found shifting with my left hand all that difficult.¹⁵ The driving was by and large uneventful.¹⁶ The biggest problems were the roundabouts, not because they were hard to drive, but because Google Maps has a nasty habit of providing bad directions through them. You’ll be swinging around one at speed, trying to find the exit for the A675309 only to veer off on the A675308 by mistake because you’ve mistaken the third exit for the fourth one. I wasted a lot of time backtracking.

Right at the end I stayed a solid five days in the Lake District. I can only say I got extraordinarily lucky; despite being well into December the weather was clear and no colder than you might expect for late September. Not unexpectedly, it was nearly devoid of tourists, and I spent literally hours hiking up and around the hills near Keswick.

I’ve been doing very well by touring around in the off-season — cheaper prices, significantly smaller crowds — so I can’t speak to what it’s like in the height of the crowds.¹⁷ But mostly devoid of people, hiking alone out through the countryside, it was one of the most alluring places I’ve ever seen. It’s an odd sort of beauty, soothing rather than stunning. The Lake District has the kind of views you can’t imagine exist outside of paintings before you see them yourself. And if your nerves are frayed because of an ongoing global pandemic, it’s a fine place to head far, far away from other people and try to knit them back together.

I was concerned about the holidays. I’ve written previously about the complicated relationship I have with them, and while I had written off Thanksgiving — I was traveling to the Orkneys that weekend¹⁸ — I was determined to do something around Christmas.

So I booked in at Cameron House, an expensive resort on Loch Lomond for three days before Christmas. This was kind of an accident. They were running a deal where you could stay one night free but it wasn’t clear it didn’t apply, and I had been convinced by a friend who excitedly agreed to join me and then discovered a week before they had a total of one day off work that week¹⁹ and canceled. I went anyway.

In general I try and budget about $50/day for lodging.²⁰ I’m not too far off from that.²¹ That budget doesn’t leave a lot of room for splurges; I’m not infrequently finding myself in windowless rooms in budget hotels.²² I’m usually fine with that.

But I’ve found my mental health is far improved if I stay in nicer places from time to time. It doesn’t have to be too much nicer. Opting for a £80 room over a £50 room at least means you’re not staring at a plastic wall all the damn time.²³

Cameron House is something else altogether. Loch Lomond has a number of ridiculously expensive golf courses²⁴ and that’s the kind of crowd it attracts. There’s a number of things to do — they have a private boat for touring the loch as well as a seaplane for aerial tours, and there’s a spa with an infinity pool and trap shooting and a pub and a clubby whisky bar and a couple fancy restaurants. The month before I arrived it hosted a number of attendees for COP26.²⁵ It’s all very nice.

It’s also, maybe surprisingly, not all that expensive. The rooms are ridiculously pricey; three days in the cheapest option was seriously pushing what I was comfortable paying. And while you could certainly splash out on expensive spa treatments or fancy dinners²⁶ you weren’t obliged to. Breakfasts in the fancy restaurant were included with the room. The pub had decent food at no more than you’d expect a mid-range pub in London to cost. The boat tour was £50 for an hour, and as the only guest who booked in I got a private tour with a guide and a pilot and a glass of 18-year single malt. I booked in an falconry walk — again, private, accompanied by two guides and a very intense Harris’s Hawk — for £70.

None of that is cheap but it’s also not back-breaking. Add in the amble hiking or bicycle trails or the gratis pool/hot tub/waterslide in the hotel and you could easily spend an enjoyable weekend for very little money. Assuming your room was comped.

I’m glad I saw it. I needed someplace quiet and relaxing, especially around the holidays. I won’t be doing it often; all the things I did I could have found on my own. But there’s something appealing about dipping your toe into that kind of sumptuousness and luxury, once in a while. Just don’t get too used to it.

I am, perhaps improbably, now sitting in Gatwick waiting for a flight back to the United States. I don’t quite know how I dodged Omicron, through some mix of prudence²⁷ and sheer dumb luck, but I tested negative a day ago and checked in without a hiccup this morning.²⁸

I’m heading back to the US to attend a larp which no longer exists, postponed until the summer in the face of the ongoing Omicron surge. If it had been scheduled a month ago they could have run, and if the news out of South Africa is as promising as it seems it’s even looking like they could have gone forward if it was scheduled a month from now. Bad timing. I’m disappointed I’m not going to get a chance to see many of my friends stateside, but here we are.

Without the larp I wouldn’t have booked travel back to the United States so early in the year, and it’s also unlikely I would have done so if Omicron had emerged before I made my ongoing travel plans. But it did, and for a number of reasons I’ve ended up with an aggressively full travel schedule for the next few months. I’m sure more disruptions lie ahead. Given the alternative — getting trapped through another dismal winter alone — I’m taking my chances.

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Footnotes

¹ This was still at the point that I thought I might need to be in Croatia in late November, and a flight to London seemed a good compromise to remain flexible.

² Although not nearly enough of them to avoid the predictable catastrophe.

³ Largely because I was hoping to get some work done in isolation — I didn’t, but that’s on me — and if you have to be somewhere as they’re announcing the latest end of the world I can say it’s one of the better I’ve found.

⁴ I am delighted when I can talk others into driving, and when I find someone who genuinely enjoys it I am more than happy to let them worry about it. As it happens, my friend both owns a zoomy car and feels like they have far too few opportunities to drive said zoomy car, so I got to see a lot of Welsh countryside go by at a slight blur.

⁵ My history is as usual piss-poor, so I was far more confused than my British friend on all the history involved.

⁶ If they were Beatles, Conwy would be Paul, Caernarfon would be George, and Harlech would be Ringo. I’ve no idea what John would be. Probably the Welsh.

⁷ Although it’d be a long day if you tried to hit more than a couple in a single day. Take your time; we stopped at Conwy on the drive up, Caernarfon the next day, then Harlech on the drive back.

⁸ I don’t know if I got lucky and snagged a late cancellation since I was planning only a few days out, but whether it was that or COVID or just winter rates it was more than reasonable. Especially considering what I got for it.

⁹ The same sort of people who are into Blake’s 7 these days, I imagine.

¹⁰ Or any number of larps riffing on those worlds

¹¹ Well, genuine, even if it’s filled with follies.

¹² It turns out, I was wrong about the efficacy of vaccines against infection with Omicron — two doses of AstraZenica appears to do literally nothing; I had expected it to be at least a little better — but I was right about vaccines holding up against serious illness and Omicron being less likely to cause hospitalizations. And I was able to get a booster shot at a walk-in clinic while I was on the way to return the car to Glasgow.

¹³ It’s been a weirdly viking-heavy year for me, what with traveling through Ireland and Denmark and Iceland and Norway and Scotland, so it only seemed fair to round it off by traveling to the site that’s generally credited with kicking off the Viking Age.

It’s only connected to the mainland over a causeway, so there are long periods every day where you can’t actually drive to it because the road’s underwater; the day I arrived it wasn’t safe until 8:30 at night, hours after sundown, and the causeway is narrow, lacks guardrails, and isn’t lit. Among the many miracles of Holy Island let us add the fact that I didn’t drive off into the North Sea.

¹⁴ Complaints and corrections may be submitted in writing to the management

¹⁵ As a counterpoint, trying to fiddle with your phone or the air conditioning — never a great idea when you’re driving, but kind of critical when you’re using Google Maps to navigate — is far more difficult and distracting if you’re right-handed but driving on the right side of the car.

¹⁶ Although for reasons passing understanding, in the last 20 minutes of the trip the panel above my left headlight just spontaneously fell off the car. I only noticed it was missing when I pulled into the parking lot to return the car, and when the person came out to check for damage they noticed it, nodded at me, and never brought it up.

¹⁷ Even in the low season there were plenty of other people hiking around. Wordsworth might have written I wandered lonely as a cloud in 1807 but it’s hard to imagine it happening these days any time daffodils are in bloom.

¹⁸ In fact, at the moment I would have been sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner on the east coast of the United States, I was on the ferry traveling from Aberdeen to Kirkwall. Quite possibly throwing up in the bathroom. Apparently my motion sickness kicks in after about four hours; the ferry to Kirkwall takes six. I reluctantly gave up on the return ticket I had and booked a flight.

¹⁹ And not even Christmas Day, at that.

²⁰ If you’re wondering where that number comes from, it’s almost exactly the cost of one-half of a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, if the two-bedroom apartment happens to be the one I was sharing with my roommate before I started traveling.

²¹ $67/day on average for 2021. The way to save money while traveling is to spend time in cheap locales, like Southeast Asia or eastern Europe. Given a year where I was mostly stuck in Dublin, the UK, and Scandinavia I think I did pretty well.

²² Point A, EasyHotel, Motel 1, Moxy, Citybox, etc. I really only need a clean room with a shower and decent WiFi. Citizen M is probably the best of the lot, and rates as one of the few cheap places I’m actually reasonably happy to land at.

²³ When I was in Birmingham alone over Christmas I did exactly that for exactly those reasons.

²⁴ The one you can see from the water apparently costs £150,000 to join and then £10,000/year to maintain your membership. There’s a waiting list.

²⁵ Including Barack Obama, apparently

²⁶ The tasting menu at the hotel restaurant was £100. That’s exorbitant.

²⁷ I didn’t go outside for a whole week before my flight

²⁸ “Without a hiccup” might be an overstatement; when I tried to check in yesterday online I found the contact form for British Airways was well and truly bollixed and when I tried to call them about it I got a recorded message saying that there were too many phone calls so they weren’t taking any more. And then I discovered upon arriving at Victoria Station that National Rail canceled all Gatwick Express trains until the 10^th. But once I made it to the airport and got through the predictably overextended check-in line there weren’t any problems.