In the end, it really wasn’t about the food.  We weren’t enthusiastic about the idea, but I’m sure we would have adapted reasonably well to Dutch cuisine.

We’ve steered away from thinking too hard about the situation in Europe until the past few days, reasoning that there wasn’t too much point focusing too early on such a volatile situation.  About as far as we got was to regularly review the entrance requirements for the countries we plan to cycle through to make sure vaccinated Americans were still permitted entry, and to track what is happening with Covid over there.

So yes, we were aware that the Netherlands experienced a sudden spike in Covid cases a few weeks ago, and that the CDC recommends travelers avoid the country now.  We haven’t been that concerned by this though - we’re vaccinated, fairly solitary, and not that worried for our own exposure.

But it wasn’t until a few days ago that it finally occurred to us that we might have an issue crossing borders once we’re in Europe.  Now that we’ve looked, we see that there is a slight problem - the Netherlands is on Germany’s high-risk list.  As a consequence, even though travelers recently in the Netherlands can enter Germany for nonessential reasons (tourism) if they’ve been vaccinated, they’re subject to quarantine once rhey arrive.

We don’t care to be quarantined, thanks.  If I were a betting man, I’d bet that by the time we’re ready to enter Germany two weeks from now the restriction will be lifted.  Cases in the Netherlands are plummeting now just as fast as they spiked, and once their rolling 7 day average drops below Germany’s threshold, Germany will drop them from their red list.

But Germany only updates their list on Fridays.  We could wait until next Friday to see if the situation has changed, but there are other considerations.  Tomorrow is the last day we can still cancel some of our bookings in the Netherlands without forfeiting our lodging payments.  Given what we know now, biking in the Netherlands looks like an unnecessarily bad bet that could end with us stuck at the border.

So we have a new, improved itinerary, fresh off the drawing board this morning.  After our flight lands in Amsterdam we’ll take the train from the airport to Antwerp and spend our first week biking in Belgium instead.  A week of waffles!  It’ll be great.

Heart

3

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply