Daily Archives: 14/03/2020

Thursday, March 12th 2020 At the end of January we returned to the UK from our one month trip to Lapland, Finland, eastern Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. At this stage we had three cruises booked [deposits paid] as well as some rail journeys booked and paid for. For many big hotel chains you can book six to nine months in advance and if you pay in advance you can often save over 20% of the cost of the hotel booking and we had taken advantage of this discount. As the booking stage of this trip geared up during the first two weeks of February 2020 there came the announcement from China of a new virus that was starting to spread amongst humans – a new strain of coronavirus named COVID-19. It was at this stage that we were going through the process of applying for our visas to Russia, Belarus, Mongolia, China and the US. It soon became clear that travel to China in April 2020 was going to be ill-advised if not impossible. So we had to re-plan without passing through China. We could only skip China by not using the train but by flying over it! As […]