A Covid Compromise

 A consistent theme across my last few travel blogs has been that a trip was either previously cancelled or taken in lieu of a different tour, all driven by the Covid 19 pandemic.  This latest blog will be no exception. Katherine and I were booked to take an 11-day tour of Poland with our tour company of choice -- Gate1 Travel -- in September of 2020.  It was only to be the two of us.  I was posted to Warsaw from 1993 to 1995 but, aside from a day trip to western Poland with my extended family 11 years ago, I had not returned.  Katherine, on the other hand, in addition to that day trip in 2012, had been to Krakow for a long weekend with a friend when we lived in Vienna, but almost 20 years had passed since that brief visit.  I recall that we got a really good deal on the originally scheduled trip, which we booked in late 2019, which facilitated our decision to take a tour and see how things had progressed over the years.

I've written before about the other Gate1 trip we booked for 2022, as a gift to Anna for graduating with her bachelors degree.  You'll recall that that trip to Africa was cancelled twice -- both times less than a week before departure -- first because of the exploding Omicron-variant surge (and our fears of being quarantined in either Kenya or Uganda), and then again when I came down with Covid a few days before we were to depart on our rescheduled trip.  We essentially gave up on Africa at the time, and as a far-less-exciting alternative, we asked Anna if she wanted to join us, if we rebooked our Poland trip.  We received an enthusiastic thumbs-up.  You may recall the tour we took of Romania in September 2022.  When we booked that, we ended up choosing between that tour or our cancelled Poland trip.  We so enjoyed that trip, that we decided shortly afterward that we would reschedule Poland, and we were very excited that Anna wanted to join us.  We took a risk at the time, not knowing if Anna could get the time away from work and/or graduate school, or even have the leave in place, as it was so far out, but armed with good travel insurance, we booked and crossed our fingers.

Our "11-Day Classic Tour of Poland"