You Are Not Going to Europe This Summer
By Robert McGarvey
My bag beckons, it is half packed and you are likely doing similar with grand visions of a pint of bitters in London or an Armagnac in Paris or a Vinho Verde in Porto.
Sober up. It is not happening, not this summer.
Not unless you have a long held ambition to be an extra in Marat/Sade.
Tune back to May 7. That’s when the UK issued its list of so-called green light countries. That’s where UK residents can travel without ado and return similarly. No tests, no quarantines. Not on the list were France, Spain and the US. On it were the Faroe Islands, the Falklands (aka the Malvinas), Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Iceland, Gibraltar, Israel, and Portugal (plus a couple Portuguese islands).
No fools the Brits, this unleashed a stampede to Portugal (even in a pandemic would you crave an excursion to the Malvinas and, no, I have no idea how you would get to these remote south Atlantic islands).
Flashforward to June 3 and a reshuffled UK list of safe destinations excluded Portugal and from June 7 on Brits returning from Portugal need to self isolate for 10 days and take two PCR tests. Of course that change triggered stampedes at the Lisbon and Porto airports – some carriers even shifted extra metal there to appease the exiting mobs.
That paragraph captures why we aren’t going to Europe this summer.
Don’t think it’s a Brit thing that has nothing to do with us. Here’s the deal: a lot of how we travel to Europe will be impacted by what limitations the UK puts on travel. And there is no guessing that.
What’s more, just about every big nation now is behaving as erratically as the UK. Including us. Including much of Europe.
Don’t think the Falklands are a go, either. They aren’t. Tourists are currently denied entry, including cruise ship passengers. I know, drat.
Nothing is certain, nothing can be counted on with international travel. What we know to be true today may be ancient nonsense tomorrow and the reason of course is that the pandemic keeps morphing, nobody knows how the vaccines will fare against still emerging variants, and nations are frantically trying to balance public health concerns with demands by their domestic travel providers to lower the barriers and let the cash registers ring.
A week ago when I looked, the sane way for me to get to Porto was to fly LAX to LHR, LHR to OPO and that was easy and modestly priced on BA – but with Portugal now demoted to the UK amber list, will the flights remain? Probably not. Because very probably most Brits will stay home – or convince themselves they really want to go to Iceland, a nation with twice as many sheep as people. Look it up.
And when the UK’s next list reshuffle is issued around June 24 will Portugal be upgraded to green and, who knows, maybe Iceland will have been downgraded to red as the virus has jumped to sheep.
Just kidding about Iceland’s sheep.
But no joking that there is no guarantee where Iceland will fall in the next reshuffle.
Just about everything else also remains uncertain. Spain, for instance, has said it will be open to all vaccinated travelers as of June 7 but hunt for details and there are none. Will it apply to Americans? Only vaccinated travelers are welcome.
Americans flying to France are welcome – if they arrive with a very recent PCR or antigen test. Only vaccinated travelers need apply.
A complication is that fake vaccination cards continue to be sold online so who could trust one? Especially at an overseas passport desk? We don’t know how foreign governments will validate CDC vaccination cards presented by Americans and we don’t know what additional proofs they may require. Thus the French solution.
Portugal, by the way, says it will open to vaccinated US travelers. “We are in a position to approve the opening of non-essential travel and flights to people from the U.S. to Portugal as long as they have a vaccination certificate,” Economy Minister Pedro Siza Vieira, cited by Portuguese radio Renascenca, said on June 8, per Reuters. But no details are known.
Meantime, all Americans returning to the US, vaccinated or not, need produce a current covid test result. There do not appear to be any countries to which this does not apply, although as with everything else in this column the facts change seemingly daily.
That border entry test requirement from the CDC dates to January 12, however, and there has been no motion to change it.
Are you beginning to feel just a little crazy?
Personally, I find myself thinking if maybe I would prefer a vacay in Yellowstone – is Yogi Bear still around? With the right laughs I just might forget how crazymaking and frustrating trying to plan international travel has come.