Swan Upping

After I straightened out the credit card glitch, I spent a few hours locking in entry tickets to museums and tours. I didn’t anticipate the layer of anxiety choosing a time would be. What if I’m tired? What if I get lost en route? What if I am captivated by a particular exhibit and don’t want to move on? What if I’m drawing and lose track of time?
In the end, I erred on the side of simplicity and booked one venue a day. If I have the energy for more, I can walk up and hope there’s a ticket available. I’ll also make a list of unticketed things to do. All bakeries deserve a visit. Ditto gardens in fair weather. I have multiple audio walking tours on a Dickensian theme downloaded to my phone. Meandering along the Serpentine is always a fine choice. Sadly, I’ll miss the annual Swan Upping since it’s a July event.

Creating an Itinerary

It’s like building a 3-D jigsaw puzzle: where to go to see which exhibits at what time, divided into length of trip, subdivided by time of day, minus days of the week venues are closed plus extended hours on certain days, and prioritized by desire.

The size of the venue and depth of the collection figures in – the V&A requires multiple times the visits of the Wallace, the Soanes multiple times the visit than the Foundling Museum. There’s the strategy of visiting obscure museums on the weekends when the major museums are swamped. Sunny days for outdoor walking tours, gardens, and street markets (happily, rain and cold never factor inside the museums). Proximity counts; locations near each other are the first choice to add in if time and stamina allow.

All the factors affect each other. Once all the facts are gathered, intuition and multiple-choice play a part. Here’s how it breaks down.

• List all the places you might want to visit. Cast a wide net
• Plug them into a document with their addresses, days, opening closing times, and websites.
• List in order of desire. Desire is highly idiosyncratic. Maybe you want full immersion in a single museum multiple days in a row, or maybe you’d like multiple venues you’ve never visited before. Follow your bliss.
• Make a bespoke Google map with the addresses.
• Make a trip day-by-day calendar.
• Plug in venues on each day by desire, proximity, and visit time – thats your rough itinerary, a starting point for negotiations if you will.
• Start booking your timed entry slots online (this is new since Covid and I’m finding it a more irksome constraint than I anticipated).

This is where I ran into the first big hitch in my get-along. The first two days I wanted for the V&A were shown as fully booked. Huh. I swapped them for the British Museum.

Then I hit a wall. My AmEx and my Visa were declined by The Courtauld (day booking) and the British Museum (membership). After several frustrating go-rounds, I called Amex. The chipper customer service person assured me my card was valid. I emptied my cache and tried again. Declined. I typed in each number instead of auto-populate. No good. What the what? I know for a fact they accept international credit cards. The customer service rep, equally baffled, tried to book a ticket using her own card and no dice. Her final advice was to email or call the museums, explain the issue and ask for help.

I sent a plaintive, polite email to the British Museum asking for their help resolving this, complete with screenshot of my Visa and AmEx being declined. What on earth could be going on? I have no plausible guess. Maybe there’s some kind of ransomware situation? I can’t even.

Other places – Westminster Cathedral, St Paul’s, The National Gallery – are a week out from releasing tickets for the days I want. I’m going to set this aside until then. Fingers crossed they’ve fixed the glitch by then.

Why ease back in when you can cannonball?

Let’s see. What have I missed? Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year x 2. I think that covers it. *

After two years of ducking into the storm cellar with every new variant and surge, I’m going to London at the end of March. Not exactly the trip I originally planned – three weeks instead of six, one city instead of three – but after reviewing the venues and exhibitions, I am fired up and feeling lucky.

Between turning the front yard into a cottage garden and raising the cutest puppy on four paws, I’ve been fully occupied and safe as it is possible to be.

Time to revisit the daily itinerary, double-check the current status of venues, and book those timed-tickets.

*That line is a quote from a dear Canadian friend.

What Became of the Britannia 2020 Tour?

As February turned into March, and rumors of illness grew to pandemic proportions, I went through the classic stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

For a (foolishly long) time I assured myself and my family that I could safely travel with the precaution of wearing a face mask on the plane and using hand sanitizer. My family became more vocal about their opposition, the numbers of sick and dying skyrocketed, and two weeks before I was scheduled to leave, I flipped and flipped hard from an attitude of I can handle this to sheltering in place, 24-7.

As museums and entire countries shut down, it became clear that my carefully crafted trip itinerary was toast – this world-wide plague was a way bigger deal than my little plans. By the time my March 25th departure date rolled around, I’d accepted my stay-at-home status.*

Unraveling my reservations – some refunds, some credits – took weeks, but as the virus toppled heads of state and entire countries locked down, vendors began to reach out to me to cancel. If I’d waited a week to cancel my flight from London to Vienna there would have been a system in place for refunds and credits. As it stands, that’s money lost.

Here let me praise Delta and its prompt return of my Skymiles and fees. My prepaid entry and tour tickets to Westminster and St. Pauls were refunded without quibble. Special acknowledgment for the Blenheim Palace staff and their help untangling several days of entry fees and tour reservations. My hotel reservations are a mixed bag of refunds and credits.

I supposed I’d reschedule the trip for spring 2021, shuffle the dates slightly, but keep the plan I had so lovingly researched for maximum art and history exposure. Now I am far from certain that I will be able or willing to travel. Covid19 is a stealthy foe and I have an unarguable pre-existing condition – my age.

Which brings me to now, the end of May. It’s time to book my Delta Skymiles ticket and rebuild the itinerary and reservations for next April.
But who knows?
There are so many unknown factors and risks in play; predicted waves of infection peaking next spring, the possibility of being quarantined upon arrival, the closure of bankrupt hotels, the collapse of entire economies. The possibility of death in isolation abroad in an overwhelmed medical facility.
What to do? Tick tock.

Do I bet on a safe and effective vaccine being available next spring? Do I hope I’ll have contracted and survived the virus and be flush with antibodies, safe from the disease and no threat to anyone else? Do I push travel forward to 2022, and negotiate with the hotels to extend my credits?
Most significantly, do I bet my age will not become an insurmountable impediment? Tick tock.

The Britannia 2020 tour was tailored to the harsh realities of aging. I had legit concerns about my physical ability to cope with the rigors of six weeks of solo travel; wonky vision, sketchy memory, diminishing stamina. Will these be significantly worse in 2021 or irrelevant, a non-issue?
Part of me wants to wave the white flag and accept I’ll be serving a life sentence in lockdown. Part of me wants to defy the odds. I’m leaning toward rolling the dice for next year.
One thing I guarantee will be different. All reservations will be refundable.

*Unexpected positive consequences: Navigating a locked-down life has a lot in common with exploring a different culture. It’s a strange land of latex gloves and facemasks, Zoom meetings, binging episodes of The Repair Shop, and stress baking. It’s been no hardship to spend days in the spring beauty of my garden and my sourdough game is on point. I’ve sent postcards to family and friends, just like I do when I travel; watercolors of birds and lions and dogs instead of details of paintings or busts of Roman emperors.
Life is sweet.

Calendar Girl

I’m wrapping up my (proposed! flexible!) day by day itinerary.
I’ve sorted events and places (hotels, flights, ticketed events), made one calendar that covers the whole trip, and weekly calendars with a skootch more venue and event information.
I based this on the calendar I made for St. Petersburg. Here’s a screenshot of it.
I’d forgotten some of the features. One I like the best is color-coding the text like this: Museums are red, Palaces orange, Churches/Cathedrals purple, Food/Markets in green, Day Trips/Tours are in pink.
Instead of blocks of black lettering, I can see the distribution of venues and excursions at a glance. It’s helpful to have a template to go by that has served me well.

These are the scaffolding of the trip, along with my Theory of Everything documents that email to myself. There’s one each for London, Vienna, and Blenheim/Oxford. They list each and every place and event with address, days and hours, ticket required or no, scheduled exhibition, and website. Sometimes the ticket cost, but not so much. I’m not flying all this way to balk at spending £10-20 on an entry fee, especially if it supports museums.

My math works like this – I fly almost for free (thanks SkyMiles!) and I’ve already paid in advance for the hotels to get the maximum discount. I don’t eat dinner out, maybe a couple of Michelin Star lunches, but otherwise no expensive meals and not a dime on alcohol. I am not interested in seeing plays or opera, concerts or nightclubs. My entertainment is soaking everything the museums have to offer, drawing postcards to send to friends and family and taking myself on Dickens-themed audio walks. Therefore it’s okay to splurge on things like a Vespa tour, or a fancy high tea, maybe even an oboe concert in a church.

Now if I could just find someone to row me in a punt on the Oxford branch of the Thames, while I lean back on a well-stocked picnic hamper and read Wind in the Willows…

EDIT: I found it!

Our Mutual Friends

One of the pleasures of traveling is reading books that enrich my experience of a place and audiobooks that accompany me as I walk the streets. I like a mix of biography, history, and fiction. Thus in Russia it was Speak, Memory (Nabokov), The Brothers Karamazov, (Dostoyevsky), Dead Souls (Gogol) and biographies of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the doomed Romanovs.

In London I am spoiled for choice, but I know Jane Austen is fine idea, especially Persuasion. I’ve been listening to the audiobook Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley. Apparently the British Library is in possession of Miss Austen’s writing desk. It’s on my must-see list now.

Dickens is marvelous when read aloud and I have Little Dorrit narrated by the incomparable Juliet Stevenson, along with Dickens-themed audiowalks. I’ll fire up P.G. Wodehouse’s oeuvre whenever I find myself in need of screwball comedy.

But where oh where can I find traces of the brilliant author, Terry Pratchett? I know Ankh-Morpork isn’t London precisely, but still. I suppose I will have to buy a dubious sausage-inna-bun from a street vendor and imagine it’s C.M.O.T. Dibbler.

Women, Westminster, & Capability Brown

Yesterday I discovered a woman-owned and operated company, Women of London, that offers tours of monuments in London honoring women. I’m going to see how expensive a private tour is since it’s rain or shine and I honestly don’t know if I could or should manage a 2+ hour walking tour in the rain. The regular tour is £20 so it might be feasible.

I definitely want to book a tour of Westminster Abbey by a verger and the upstairs/downstairs Blenheim Palace tours. Westminster Abbey stopped online booking at the end of March. I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks.

Blenheim Palace is vast, and a tour will help orient me, plus if done well is just the sort of historical gossip I enjoy. My historical knowledge is limited to the movie The Favourite, a ‘punk Restoration romp’ that centers on the relationship of the Duchess of Marlborough and Queen Anne. My other connection is my Cavalier Blenheim Cavalier spaniel. A regal little goofball o’ fluff.

Interesting connection, the landscape of Blenheim was designed by Capability Brown, and there is a memorial fountain dedicated to him in Westminster, appropriately enough in the center of a green space inside the cloister. It’s inscribed with this delightful Walpole quote;
“With one lost paradise the name
Of our first ancestor is stained;
Brown shall enjoy unsullied fame
For so many a paradise regained”