Travelling During a Pandemic, Part 1

It’s a strange world we live in. After the relative normalcy of Hawaii, where, despite the stay-at-home order, we still regularly chatted with our neighbors outside, and many stores and restaurants were still open if modified, it was eye-opening to go travelling around the world and to see how the pandemic is playing out in other cities. 

As you’ll recall from my last post, our goal was to move from Honolulu to England. My visa allowed me to enter the UK only between April 24 and May 24, so we had a limited window in which we could travel. Rory’s US visa also expired at the end of June, as did our American health insurance (important to have when one is pregnant!), so we felt compelled to proceed with our moving plans despite the plethora of uncertainties facing us.

In late March, as Hawaii started to implement stay-at-home orders and Rory and I began working from home, we were ecstatic to have found decent flights for all three of us for a measly $1500. That’s about a third as much as they usually cost. Maybe this pandemic won’t be so bad after all, I thought. Maybe we’ll be able to stay under our budget for moving costs. By mid-April, however, Rory, checking the status of our flights, reported that certain legs of the three-flight journey had disappeared from our itinerary. I started feeling nervous. They’ll find other flights for us, right? We’ve paid for the tickets, so we’ll get there somehow, he kept assuring me. But towards the end of April, the whole itinerary was gone. The flights just weren’t running anymore. 

I often project a calm demeanor in the face of difficulties, but this stressed the heck out of me. All of our moving plans revolved around actually leaving Hawaii on May 7. What if we couldn’t get to the UK? What if we bought more plane tickets, only to have them disappear too? Rory called United Airlines multiple times, but the best they could do was get us on terrible flights that would end at London’s Heathrow Airport. We considered various ways of getting north from London to Dumfries (where Rory’s parents live), or Edinburgh (the airport closest to them). Neither a seven-hour train ride nor a six-hour drive sounded appealing after two days of flying. We thought about buying a plane ticket with a different airline just from London to Edinburgh, but we didn’t want the hassle of gathering and re-checking our many suitcases and paying for them a second time either. What to do?

We bought new plane tickets, that’s what. The options were limited by this point, and a four-flight, 35-hour journey with American Airlines was the best we could get. Instead of $1500, (which was not refunded) it now cost closer to $4000. There was no guarantee that these flights would run either, so we just crossed our fingers and kept packing.

Our house in it's mostly-emptied state.

Fast-forward to Thursday, April 30. The movers came at 8 am and packed up a portion of our belongings to put on a boat. Over the next five days, our friends and neighbors took all of our furniture, appliances, and warm-weather accoutrements (goodbye, snorkel gear and beach umbrella), and left us with a nearly empty apartment. We packed our suitcases and cleaned our house. We turned in our keys. On May 5th and 6th we stayed at a hotel near the Honolulu Airport. Rory continued to check on our flights and thankfully, they still appeared to be running. Finally, it was May 7th, the day to fly. After eating leftover Vietnamese food in our hotel room for lunch, we hauled our three large suitcases, my cello, my violin, three backpacks, a carry-on roller bag, a snack bag, and my purse to a taxi and drove to the airport. And so began our journey.

With our luggage on the airport curb, I looked around at the familiar surroundings one last time. Half-completed parking garage up ahead, confusing green road signs indicating the way to Honolulu and Waikiki, and palm trees lazily swaying in the distance. It looked as I remembered. Except that everything else was different. No cars weaving in and out of lanes, no people hurrying to the check-in counters, no garish aloha shirts worn by tourists with lei (flower necklaces) around their necks. It was desolate. Rory pulled out a camera to capture the complete lack of activity. Instead of the usual excitement tinged with sadness that I often felt at this curbside at the start of a journey, I felt hollow, afraid. We were alone.

In Part 2 of this post, we’ll share about our journey through the Honolulu, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London Heathrow airports. 

Goodbye, Hawaii

Sunset over Waikiki.

Our blog, Turnbull Travels, has been dormant for two years. After the initial shock of moving to Hawaii wore off, and the prospect of potentially living here forever set in, I felt less need to document all the exciting quirks of life in Hawaii. Also, parenting and work took over our lives. But now our stay in Hawaii is coming to an end and a new adventure awaits us.

It has been almost three years that we’ve lived in Honolulu. While Rory has happily continued with his assistant professorship at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, I’ve had a variety of teaching jobs, ranging from being a full-time orchestra teacher at a Catholic all-boys school (I often needed those Hail Marys), to starting a violin program with the Hawaii Youth Symphony for underprivileged predominantly native-Hawaiian students. We’ve developed fulfilling relationships with friends and colleagues while making progress in our careers.

Our beautiful daughter has become an articulate and quirky blonde three-and-a-half year-old, flourishing under the warm sun and palm trees. She’s attended two preschools here and has made plenty of friends, though she still usually prefers the company of her stuffed animals and her imagination. She gets excited when it’s “cold” enough to wear a jacket. To stay connected to family, she Skypes weekly with her grandparents and likes to send them long strings of emojis on Whatsapp. By Rory’s calculations, she’s been on nearly 30 airplanes in her short life.

Hawaii has been good to us. If you have enough money, it’s easy to live here. Throw out half of your wardrobe, buy a good pair of slippers (flip flops), and you’re basically set. It is undoubtedly the most beautiful place I will ever live in. I wake up to lush green mountains every morning and they still take my breath away. We’ve also had the chance to see three of the other Hawaiian islands besides O‘ahu -- Kauaʻi, Big Island, and Molokaʻi, and all of them have their own incredibly unique landscapes and flavors. Hawaii has provided us with amazing adventures and a home that is easy to love.

View of the windward side of Oahu while hiking.

Sadly, it was hard for us to visualize ourselves living in Hawaii long-term. We’ve been fortunate to live in subsidized university faculty housing, making our two bedroom apartment reasonably affordable. But as we approached the end of our allotted time there, the prospect of buying a house began to loom large. With average home prices in our neighborhood of nearly a million dollars, we had to consider the possibility of moving out to the suburbs, where houses are only slightly less absurdly expensive, and commute times are disheartening. We also began to think about the Hawaii education system as our daughter gets closer to kindergarten. Underfunded, low-quality public schools push people towards $22,000-per-year private schools, making Honolulu the second highest metro area in the nation in terms of private school enrollment. Being hugely in debt for the next 20-30 years was not what we were looking for.

Then there’s family. Rory and I have lived far from both of our families for the last eleven years. We are the only ones among our siblings who do not live within driving distance of our parents. Though we try to visit family at least once a year, the 30 hours of travel required to get to Scotland from Hawaii makes it a difficult journey. The eight hours to my parents’ house in Oregon feels like a quick hop by comparison. So as much as we loved Hawaii, in the back of our minds, we knew that if a good job came along near one of our families, we would seriously consider it.

That opportunity waltzed in our door last September. Rory was offered a permanent position at Newcastle University in the north of England, which is only a two-hour drive from his parents in Scotland. Given his narrow linguistic specialization, there are few professorships that Rory would qualify for in a given year, and hardly any in the UK. We didn’t expect to see such an opportunity to be close to family coming around again for a long time. So we jumped.

Before the movers arrived.

And now here we are, with three days left in Hawaii, frantically trying to pack, sell, and give away our belongings. We have had seven months to plan this move, and the complexities of it have been daunting. Spreadsheets and shared Google Docs have been our lifeline. I spent months (and more than $3500) working on getting a UK visa for myself, not knowing if I would receive it in time. We were given a £5000 allowance for moving expenses from Newcastle University, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that we’re moving 7,200 miles, or almost ⅓ of the way around the earth and our stuff has to cross two oceans and a continent. For a moving company to ship even a small fraction of our household belongings, with no furniture whatsoever, was going to cost at least $5000 and take two plus months to arrive. And of course, flights from Honolulu to the UK usually cost a minimum of $1000 per person and require somewhere north of 24 hours of travel time. This will be Rory’s fourth intercontinental move and my third, so we know the ropes, but the complexity of this one has been at times overwhelming.

Loading our stuff into the moving truck.

Then you add in a global pandemic. Things that we take for granted suddenly became nail biting uncertainties. Would the UK’s borders be shut? (No.) Would we have to self-quarantine upon arrival? (Possibly.) Would our flights be cancelled? (Yes.) Would the airlines still serve food? (Not sure.) Would we be able to find a hotel that wasn’t closed? (Yes, after our first booking was cancelled.) Fortunately, our friends and neighbors have been a great help, happily lending us things and buying our belongings from us (who would have thought that we’d be eager to see masked strangers coming to our door to take away our stuff?) Everyone is stressed out right now, everyone feels overwhelmed with uncertainty, but carrying out an intercontinental move during a global pandemic? My cortisol levels are through the roof.

Still, as I keep telling myself, we’ve nearly made it. The movers came last week and packed up our shipment. After today, all of our furniture will be gone. Tonight is our last night to sleep in our house and we fly out this Thursday. Things are going more or less according to plan. But there’s one other twist in this story.

I’m five months pregnant.

A trip to London

Last week we went to London to see Soraya, a dear Baha'i friend from Columbus. She was just on her way out of the UK after studying in Oxford for a term. It's easy to forget how close London and Paris are - it's just 2 and a half hours by train from city centre to city centre. London is closer to Paris than it is to Glasgow, and Paris is closer to London than it is to Marseille!

So, it wasn't difficult to hop up to England to see Soraya. We had planned to visit the New Southgate cemetery, which is where Shoghi Effendi (the leader of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to 1957) is buried. It's a little far from central London so I think Soraya appreciated us being able to help her with directions and navigating the tube.

A view of the resting place of Shoghi Effendi. The tulips were blooming!

After paying our respects at the cemetery, we toured around central London a little. This included a trip to Oxford Road, where we looked in shops for baby things, and Soraya practically fainted at the cost of pushchairs. ("How does anyone afford to have children?") We also got to explore the famous department store Selfridge's, which we were disappointed to discover does not actually sell fridges.

Talia outside of Selfridge's

At the risk of making an obvious statement,London is different from Paris.

Yes, I've become that person who visits somewhere and then spends the whole time comparing it to wherever they live. ("Ugh, these baguettes aren't as good as in Paris.") This can be obnoxious if the place you're visiting is a little village or in a radically different culture, but in the case of London, it feels appropriate to compare it to Paris. (Both are global cities consistently ranked in the top 5 for participation in the worldwide economy.)

So, some observations that I made, in no particular order:

• London is cleaner. Not just the streets, which have less litter and, uh, organic detritus, but even just the trains and buses seem to be less grimey.
• The London underground (locally known as the tube, although I kept calling it the métro), especially the older lines, has small tunnels, claustrophobic trains, and feels much more like a series of old mineshafts. By comparison, most of the Paris underground feels like a set of train stations that just happen to be underground.
• The architecture in London is less varied than that of Paris. I'm not sure to what extent this is due to London neighbourhoods being levelled during the blitz in WWII...
• London also feels much much bigger than Paris, and the transport system is much more confusing, although these feelings might just be due to Paris being familiar to me and London unfamiliar.
• Also, people speak English in London, and French in Paris, but I overheard a surprising amount of French in London. Apparently somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 French people live in London, giving rise to the claim that London is France's sixth largest city.

I'm curious to know if others share my perspectives (even if you've only visited one of these places). Let me know in the comments! Part of the fun of travelling is seeing how things are different or the same from places you are used to. I'm not sure what I am "used to" now (having lived in three different countries), but comparing things can still bring fresh insights.

Bonne année!

Happy New Year! Hard to believe we're only four years away from 2020 now. It's like we're living in ...THE FUTURE!

We hope you all had joyeuses fêtes and are settling into a happy and productive 2016. Rory and I enjoyed spending Christmas and the new year (or Hogmanay as the Scots call it) in Scotland. We had a relaxing time seeing friends and family, driving to Glasgow, Coatbridge, and Glenfarg to visit people, and generally eating too much good food. It was the perfect cure to my feeling cooped up and lonely in Paris.

The obligatory silly Christmas photo with the family

As a side note, when I first started traveling to the UK five years ago, I was hyperaware of all the differences between Britain and the US. Everything seemed foreign and (forgive me British friends and family) charming and quaint. As I became more familiar with the country and customs, those feelings ebbed, but I still felt very conspicuous and out of place. I would try to mimic the speech patterns of the natives, make sure not to say "pants" when I meant "trousers", all in an effort to not be the obvious and clueless American.

After five months in France however, I have come to regard Britain as my second home. I feel comfortable there, I can almost always understand what people are saying (except in Glasgow--man, those accents are thick!), and I feel that I can be myself 96% of the time. Compared to the challenges of living in a country where you're bad at the language and where the culture is significantly different from your own, being in the UK is a walk in the park. I could even see us living there some day.

Now, back to the task at hand. Our trip to Scotland was lovely and pretty standard, except for one particularly stunning day. You may have heard of (or experienced) the flooding that was happening in parts of Scotland and northern England this past month. If not, it was serious stuff. Towns were submerged when rivers flooded their banks and a considerable amount of damage was done in many places.

Dumfries, where the Turnbulls live, is in the south of Scotland, and although it sees a bit of flooding every year or so, it isn't usually too bad. This year, however, was a doozy. The Turnbulls' house was never in danger, thankfully. But when the local river burst its banks we headed downtown to see the flooding in progress. We went during the afternoon and again in the evening when the water was even deeper. Here are some photos.

The churning River Nith, breaking its banks

Not the best place to sit...

A friendly policeman helping neighbors pile sandbags at their door

Notice the change in water level between afternoon and evening...

It's just water under the bridge

No shopping tonight

Perhaps not the best place to leave the car

Fortunately, this is about as bad as it got. By the next day, the water levels had receded considerably and although things were still very soggy and many shop owners had goods damaged by the floods, no houses or cars were swept away and most people avoided any problems at all. Dumfries was lucky!

And that's all for Scotland. Next week, Rory will share more of our thrilling adventures in Paris. Have a great week!