Travel (Maybe)

I've been fizzing back and forth on a trip to Iceland in July. Like in three weeks, July. This year.

I signed up for this trip last August, so it's been on my horizon since then. It's ambitious: two weeks away, a week of it aboard a beautiful small classic sailing ship. A few days in a hotel in Reykjavik before the trip, a couple in the remote town on the northwest coast of Iceland afterwards.

I made the airline and hotel reservations in mid-January. My first choices were already sold out - July is the top month for travel to Iceland. Most of it is paid for.

Of course I assumed for the past couple of months I wouldn't be going. I originally signed up via a travel broker in the UK that specializes in booking passage on classic sailing ships. They sent an email in late March saying they were shutting down and they had turned all of the records over to the owners of the ship. I heard from the airline all my flights were cancelled.

Still I followed the voyage of the mighty little Tecla. I started following her after I booked the trip last August. She was in Greenland when first I found her, and she made her way through the melting pack ice of the Northwest passage in Canadian waters - the first large sailing ship to do so. She had a crew/passenger change in Nome, Alaska, and was off to the Galapagos. She visited Easter Island, rounded Cape Horn entirely under sail, stopped at the Falklands. Then, she was off to Antarctica. She got to Cape Town, South Africa, a few days after the country shut her borders. Allowed to anchor, and to obtain supplies, but not to disembark.  At first, it appeared the passengers wouldn't be allowed off, but after two weeks they were allowed to fly to their homes. (Quarantine, even though the passengers and crew had not touched inhabited lands or seen other people for the several weeks of the Antarctic voyage, and Covid was not known to have spread out of China when they set off from the Falklands.) The four professional crew took the boat home to the Netherlands, via the Azores, where again they were not allowed ashore (despite more than four weeks enroute from Cape Town) but they obtained fuel and fresh food. They got to the Netherlands last week.

The Tecla is owned by a family - bought by a husband and wife for this type of adventure cruising a decade or so ago (paying passenger crews subsidizing their Arctic yearning). Now, the ship is mostly sailed by their grown son and daughter. They usually have two family aboard, and two other crew. They can take up to twelve passengers, in two person cabins (that each have their own little water closet). This is a very similar size and arrangement to the Pride of Baltimore II that I have been on in the Chesapeake.

After a few days of the first time ashore since Antarctica and family reunion, the Tecla folks decided to go ahead and operate the Iceland trips in July. I vacillated mightily. But I decided Sunday I wanted to go, and if I can, I will.

Before you jump all over me, keep reading.

Iceland is a small island nation, an advantage in locking down and fighting the spread of the virus. They had a high tech international biolab company with its flagship laboratory there, and quickly they were able to ramp up testing to one of the highest rates in the world. The virus got ahead of them initially, but as of now there are less than a half-a-dozen active known cases in the country. They have implemented a government sponsored phone app for contact tracing, and more than half the country has put it on their phones. They are opening back up, and even are opening swimming pools and barbershops.  (Swimming is a huge thing in Iceland - they tap their greatest natural resource, hot springs, to provide indoor public pools everywhere.)

Iceland has had a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all visitors since the lock-down started. They are open for visitors from Europe, the Schengen area, and just started an option of, instead of quarantine upon arrival, getting a PCR test (the kind that feels like they are scraping your brain) with results in less than 24 hours. If no known problems surface in the next two weeks, they will open to the rest of the world on the same terms July 1.

My original flights on United that were cancelled involved domestic legs before flying on the seasonal non-stops to Reykjavik. After some time on the phone with the airline Sunday morning, I rejected what they would offer me, with circuitous routings and thus more airports - each airport being an additional potential contagion point. While on hold with them, I checked into Air Iceland's offerings, and this economically shaky (but extremely important to the Icelandic tourist industry) airline has put on a less than daily non-stop flight from Dulles to Reykjavik. I was able to book non-stops with slight adjustments in my schedules (one less day in-country before boarding Tecla).

So here's the deal with virus risk. I will need to travel, masked, through Dulles Airport and onto an airplane that is, I believe, selling every seat they can, not blocking any for infection control. But upon arrival, I will be tested, and everyone else on the plane will also be tested. Contact information will be collected and I'll download the tracing app and go to my hotel. Once I get my clear test result, I'll be free to travel in an infection-free country. I'll board a small ship with up to 15 other people. On board, we will practice hygiene as best we can, and everywhere we plan to sail is extremely remote and without any (or much) settlement. When I get off the ship in Isafjordur (I can spell this without checking now!) I will either drive with fellow passengers or fly internally back to Reykjavik, spend another night in the same hotel, and then fly non-stop back to Dulles. When I get home, I'll do a two-week self quarantine, relying on family to do my shopping and staying away from our crowded park trails.

So the main vulnerability is me or a fellow crew member catching the virus as we travel into Iceland, so it doesn't yet show on the arrival test, and then becoming infectious and later symptomatic on our little voyage. Likewise, the trip home is a risk, but the plane ride home not so much, since I'll be leaving a "clean" country.

So in my opinion, the virus risks are acceptable. But as I started to figure this out, I really agonized over whether I really even wanted to go.

This trip is a very big deal to me. It takes a lot of gumption for me to travel on my own. I love it and I dread it both. I do not meet new people easily or naturally. A day or so after being on the boat, I'll be fine with my fellow crew members. It's the days before and after that have had me worried - I don't want to lurk in my hotel with room service, but eating alone in restaurants in a strange country isn't so easy. I planned to book some guided day trips from Reykjavik after I got there. But all the time, on my own and figuring things out solo, I've got an edge of adrenaline coursing through my veins. Aside from the social stuff, I planned to train for this trip and be much more fit by now than I actually am. If I go, I leave in three weeks and I can't reverse several months of lying on the couch obsessively tracking the news in that period of time. The truth is, the more fit I am the better time I'll have. But they don't actually require me to work the ship if I don't want to. There will be hikes ashore in the remote fjords, but I don't have to go, or go far. I could hang out on the beach and pretend my passion is macro photography of lichen and rocks. 

The deciding moment for me was when I was sailing this past Saturday. The day was lovely, we were out in a nice wind in the middle of the day, and I realized I felt better throughout my body than I have felt in days. Of course I want to do this trip. And it'll be fine. The parts I'm nervous about will be fine. I've even communicated with one of a couple of relatively local people (mid-Atlantic region, anyway) that are also going on the same trip - I think we're even going over on the same flight!

There are a lot of "ifs" around whether I will be allowed to do this trip. But the question of "do I want to" has finally been answered in my head and I'll be disappointed if I can't go. Maybe a tiny bit relieved, but mostly disappointed.