Stress and Chaos! 13th March

Today has not been the greatest, Vince’s cold has got worse and I woke with a bit of a cough and “sticky” eyes. Vince checked the NHS info on-line and we are not “high risk” of Corona Virus but to be on the safe side we rang the Portree Medical Centre who told us to stay put and a Doctor would call us.

After about an hour we got a call from a Nurse Practitioner (Dohhh not a Doctor in my book). She basically said that as we didn’t have a fever or a constant cough we didn’t need to self isolate. I had already taken and antihistamine for my eyes and was bathing them in warm salt water, which is all she suggested, other than going to the chemist for some drops.

Vince had a Smart Traveller warning for the UK saying “reconsider travel and return home” plus calls from each of his 3 siblings in Australia worried that the Prime Minster, Scott Morrison, may close Australia’s borders and we might not be able to get back home.

This lead to a long tooing and froing about what best to do - should we pack up and go home early? Should we just toddle along as normal with our plans? Should we alter some of them to avoid big cities? Could we change our flight from London to Glasgow which is closer to Isle of Skye? My head felt like a washing machine.

After hours for frustration on the phone and internet talking with a variety of people from our Travel Insurer, RAC, who said its not covered if we change our plans but if Smart Traveller upgrades to "Don’t Travel" then contact them and we might be covered then, to

Malaysian Airlines (who just handball us back to Qantas (who we booked with) but the substantial payments we made to them for extra leg room seats and baggage allowance (around $1600) would not be transferred to any new flight. FFS - they don’t make it easy. I couldn’t even get through to Qantas, the “manage my booking” online won’t let me change anything saying you need to call them, and the call centre has a 4 hour wait - after waiting about an hour I lost the will to live and hung up.

So it’s all a bit of a depressing and confusing mess at the moment and things are changing rapidly and almost daily on the Corona Virus front. In the end we decided to just hold off and wait things out for now. We don’t want to jump the gun unnecessarily, potentially loose a great deal of money, and have to spend more money on a flight home unless we are sure it is really warranted. But what we will do is start to prepare for departure doing things like posting home things that will just be extra weight, returning our sheepskin quad to Skye Skyns so they can send it home etc, so that in the event that something drastic is announced we can high-tail out of the UK expediently.

I called my Dad on WhatsApp, who was having surgery today, and he is doing well - so that’s great. My daughter, Christina, called on WhatsApp to tell me some alarming news about my little Grandie, Piper - but she’s okay - phew! It is also the 4th birthday of little Cash, my Grandson from my son Kyle (who died), but his mother doesn’t let our family seen him - very sad. All in all a very high stress and emotional morning!

Vince popped out for a couple of hours in the rare sunshine down to Aird to catch up with David (our new friend from the Uig Hotel meeting) to teach him some droning techniques.

When Vince got home we headed out to Portree to do the weekly shopping at the Portree Butcher in the Portakabin, and the Co Op, as we had run out of essentials, and I also needed to pop into Boots the Chemist to get some drops for my eyes. Our coughs are just dry and infrequent so we don’t need anything for that just now. Vince admitted on the ride home that when he was in Boots he was looking at everyone, mostly there to get scripts because they are sick, and hoped none of them had Corona Virus - the pandemic is making us paranoid!

The Co Op had empty shelves on a lot of items, including toilet paper, so we stopped in at Rankins in Uig for that - they had plenty! They also had some antibacterial cleaning cloths for kitchens, so we grabbed a pack to use on public transport and the plane.

When we got home to Willie McLeod’s we had a surprise, our gift for Alan and copies for ourselves and Lorraine had arrived. We were going to give it to him just before we leave, but given today’s turn of events we are not really sure that will still be on 29th March as planned or not, so we will surprise him on Sunday at our regular roast lunch - can’t wait to see the look on his face!

I made Chilli con Carne with rice for tea - as I want to try to use up as many of the supplies I have in the larder as possible. Vince had a “dram” and I had a G&T - the end of a beautiful sunny day on Skye pretty much wasted with “travel dramas” we can do without! Hopefully we will get back on track with our holiday tomorrow!