For a Ryanair flight from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Dublin, Ireland, departing May 23, 2020, on Jan. 14 I booked tickets for our tour group of eight through Roxanne McCallum at the excellent travel agency Travelosophy (Commerce Township, MI; 800/332-2687, itravelosophy.com). The cost was $727.11 total, or about $91 per person.
In late March 2020, Roxanne informed me that, due to COVID-19, Ryanair had canceled all of its April and May flights.
Dear Globetrotter:
Welcome to the 546th issue of your monthly worldwide travel magazine, keeping the travel embers glowing.
This story began just before the coronavirus pandemic was recognized and travel was shut down, and it ended in April 2021.
The morning of Feb. 7, 2020, my wife and I were about to leave for the airport in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — eventually to arrive in Luang Prabang, Laos, via Toronto, Seoul and Bangkok, for a tour with Wild Frontiers (Sparks, NV; 844/540-2714, wildfrontierstravel.com) — when we learned that our Air Canada flight from Pittsburgh to Toronto, Canada, was canceled.
In October 2019, I booked back-to-back, 8-day tours in Italy with the British company Travelsphere (Unit P, Welland Industrial Estate, Valley Way, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 7PS, U.K.; phone +44 1858 415 128, www.travelsphere.co.uk).
Scheduled for September 2020, the first trip was to the island of Elba (from where my maternal grandparents emigrated to America in 1907), and the second trip included the Cinque Terre on Italy’s northwestern coast.
My husband and I used Schiphol Travel Taxi (Oosterlandenweg 15, 8271 ES IJsselmuiden, The Netherlands; phone +31 38 339 4768, www.schipholtraveltaxi.nl/en) in June 2014. I reserved transportation from Schiphol Amsterdam Airport to Rotterdam and back, prepaying with a credit card.