Bulgaria Week 0 – England to Bansko: An Epic Journey

WHAT. A. WEEK. I should start by saying that we have arrived safely in Bansko and we are beyond happy and excited to be here! However, we are here almost two weeks earlier than we had originally planned, having only decided to make this last-minute change two days before the day we got on the plane to go skiing in Bansko.

Our original plan was to spend December, including Christmas and New Year, visiting our families who are dotted around England. This is how our itinerary originally looked:

1. Fly from Cyprus to London. Stay with my parents and swap summer clothes for winter clothes
2. Train to Manchester to see friends and family
3. Train to Gloucester for a long weekend in the Forest of Dean to see Aaron’s mum, stepdad and siblings
4. Train to North Somerset for early Christmas with Aaron’s dad and stepmum Judy
5. Train to Essex for Christmas and New Year, and FINALLY
6. Flight on 5 January to Bulgaria.

This plan would have meant we could have dropped our things in Essex and travelled around the country visiting people, without carrying everything we owned on our backs!

However, when our flight from Cyprus to London was cancelled, we thought we’d be “clever” and fly into Manchester, to save both time and money of travelling from London to Manchester. What we didn’t think about in this genius plan is this meant carrying all our Christmas presents, as well as a VERY heavy backpack, around the country. Big mistake!

Once we had reached North Somerset, we were feeling very concerned about the Covid situation – concerned that we might pass it to friends and family or that we might pick it up ourselves. We certainly didn’t want to cause anyone to be ill over Christmas and we were really on edge about having our trip cancelled or postponed – something that we couldn’t let happen as we had nowhere to live in the UK!

Everything came to a head though when we were staying with Aaron’s dad and Covid eventually intervened with my dad testing positive for Covid. This effectively cancelled Christmas, or at least Essexmas(!) as we no longer had a place to stay. Also, it seemed a pointless journey if I wouldn’t be able to see them anyway.

With that bombshell, we had a decision to make.

Do we incur the cost of moving our flights forward (an extra £300 for a Ryanair flight – scandalous!) and the cost of additional accommodation or do we try and find somewhere to stay in the UK over Christmas?

With Essexmas out of the question, and our Covid anxiety at an all-time high, we were leaning towards leaving England before Christmas as we were not sure whether Bulgaria might close its borders to the UK, whether we might be caught in a UK lockdown, or whether we might get Covid which would prevent us from travelling.

However, what really made our decision was the thought of spending Christmas in a grotty London hotel (or at least probably grotty given our budget and London rates!) and we decided that Christmas would be spent in Bulgaria this year!

What we didn’t know was that making that decision was the easy part of the whole saga, and making the decision was pretty stressful (as I’m sure Aaron’s dad & stepmum, who were lucky enough to witness all this decision making, would agree with!).

With a change of plan in place, we were faced by an array of different problems! The biggest being:

1. All of our Christmas presents, winter clothes, and ski gear were in Essex with my parents where they were kindly storing it all for us whilst we have no fixed address; and
2. I needed to see if I wanted to ski for three months! I’d had a trip to the optician in Essex where my contact lenses were waiting for me planned whilst we were in there.

So, a trip through Essex was essential – even though at this point, we were in Bristol, on the other side of the country!

So, we began to plan an epic journey across the country which involved crossing London with all our luggage, meeting my mum in a train station car park and madly grabbing all the things we needed in the 20-minute window we had before our next train, and a mad dash to Southend-on-Sea for an optician appointment to collect my contact lenses.

We left Aaron’s Dads at 11am and arrived at Stansted Airport at 8.45pm, grabbing an hour or two (at a push) of broken sleep on the airport floor before checking in to our flight at 3am on Christmas Eve. It was such an epic day BUT we managed to get everything we needed, and the journey was seamless, which is an absolute miracle when relying on public transport!

Unfortunately, this meant that our time with our families in December was tarnished by Covid a bit. We were always thinking about it, and we spent a lot of time solving problems that it caused. Of course, we are still in the middle of a pandemic, so it is to be expected but at the time that we made these plans, in October whilst still in Cyprus where it felt like Covid barely existed, we hadn’t anticipated a new, very contagious variant to rear its head!

So, whilst we ended up spending Christmas away from our families for a second year in a row, we were lucky enough to see some of our family over Christmas, and even got to have an early Christmas with Aaron’s mum, stepdad and siblings and then later with Aaron’s dad, stepmum, sister and nephew which was lovely.

Plus, Christmas and New Year in Bansko, whilst wasn’t how we’d envisaged or planned it, was great fun and we spent Christmas Day on slopes, sipping mulled wine…can’t be bad!

Until next week!

Love, Meg

xx