In our kitchen, we have a world map.

It’s one of those that you scratch off the countries you’ve been to.

Quite unsurprisingly, we’ve decided not to travel abroad this year. There are just too many questions and general travel weirdness.

For example: if you book a holiday in a green rated country it means you don’t need to quarantine.

Fab.

But it still means that you have to present a negative Covid test result. The PCR one. That’s the one that needs to be sent off to a lab and the results come back in about 48 hours, not the NHS track and trace one which gives results in 30 minutes. Beware. Airlines are refusing to allow people to board if you present the wrong test result!

And then there is the very real situation that despite the UK being quite advanced with the vaccine programme, our chosen destination might not be.

Stuff like that.

So, nothing abroad for 2021 until the new travel routines stabilise so, I’m currently looking for a scratch off map for the UK.

There are loads of places that are now included in our UK based travel plans: places like Northumberland in Sept/October for castles, Hadrian’s Wall, Roman forts, museums and walking. (I am particularly excited about walking to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne!

Lindisfarne Castle | National Trust

And then it’s off to the Yorkshire Dales in November.

Plus, we have multiple days out planned to nearby places of interest, now that they have re-opened.

For further afield, well, just because we aren’t going abroad this year, doesn’t mean we can’t make cunning plans for future visits.

Not sure if it was just me, but during lockdown, I started creating itineraries for future travels.

Yip – I am talking about epic Excel spreadsheets of travel plans..…and to be honest, it was great!  I had many hours of fun reading up on different countries – I got a few guidebooks and did some internet research – and then began to figure out travel routes. In some ways this was massively therapeutic. It wasn’t ACTUALLY physical travel, but it sort of felt like it.

Besides, it gave me something to do other than watch Netflix.

Actioning these plans will be a challenge though – we now have several itineraries waiting but I have no idea how we are going to factor this in to time off work for starters, let alone where the financing will come from for these!

So far, we have itineraries or partial itineraries for (no order of preference):

Australia / New Zealand – a mammoth 6 weeker!

Washington DC and the Civil War battlefields

Canada

And maybe there’s a paleontological dig or 2? (Mmm…this idea is also still cooking!)

It might be a bit soon for us to be booking for 2022 but no harm in thinking about options. Watch this space to see what might be next!

Our scratch off world map, unfortunately, will have to wait a bit longer.