Well thank you for all your responses Gransnetters. At the moment we are watching and waiting. We are aware that by travelling to France we could use our own car, the safety provisions put in place by Brittany Ferries are reassuring, a cottage in the countryside would be relatively isolated, and we wouldn’t need to fly to get there, nor would we need to travel very far on either side of the Channel, as we live near the south coast. I particularly don’t want to necessitate staying overnight in a variety of B+Bs. Our daughter has taken a house in France near the Pyrenees, which again is quite isolated, and has invited us to join them, but as I said, I don’t want to stay overnight on the way down. We’ve tried to consider how we can take miminal risk for both ourselves and anywhere we might visit.
I’m aware that there is a risk in any travel, but there is also a risk when I go shopping or to the hairdresser, and I’ve done both in the last three or four weeks, after a prolonged total lockdown, with not even a visit to the shops for many weeks. We are both in our sixties, and are in reasonable health, although I have asthma. We will wait and watch, but if we do decide to travel, I suspect we may go to Normandy rather than Brittany.
I might add, I suffer from depression, normally well controlled with my medication, but I’ve found lockdown very difficult for this reason. The total absence of my usual life made me feel very down, and I struggled at times. Regularly seeing my friends and family, and planning holidays and travel was motivating for me, and the total lack of those usual activities had quite a profound effect. I’m beginning to recover my equilibrium now, and planning a short break was part of that.