Ireland First Impressions…continued
A bit of follow up to a previous post on our Best of Ireland Small Groups tour.
The day before yesterday the tour stared with the reception dinner in the Westin Hotel in Dublin. The dinner was quite nice and all the travelers on the tour seemed very nice and all the typical Tauck demographic.
Yesterday was our first touring day. We toured St Patricks Cathedral and Dublin Castle. We also toured the city on the bus. The afternoon was a free afternoon to do what we wanted.
I started to feel a bit out of sorts in the afternoon with a minor sore throat and a slight fever with some body aches. We brought some at home Covid tests with us and I decided to test myself. You can probably fill in the blanks from here! 
I tested positive for Covid. Thankfully my wife was negative. Both of us are double vaccinated and double boosted. I guess that didn’t protect me. We were both fairly diligent in our mask wearing. I most likely got infected on the plane or at the Newark airport or Dublin airport.
Mask wearing in Ireland right now is almost non existent. The mask wearing we encountered at the airports and on the planes was spotty at best.
Anyway what I hoped would be a few on tour posts and a trip review at the end will not happen. Our tour began and ended on day one.
We do have the Tauck Guest Protection for this tour but we did book our own air.
I know some other forum readers have had similar issues so I would welcome any comments.
Signing off from our ~~Hotel Room~~ Prison Room at the Westin.
Comments
John, oh dear! You do get some bad luck, So sorry to hear this.
I am pretty sure the insurance will cover your flights under trip interruption. I hope you can return home soon. Tauck will reimburse you from the moment you test positive, though I understand it can take some time because there are so many people in your situation. Advise you get the infection diagnosed by a doctor and keep the paperwork, or somehow document the positive test so you can get a certificate of recovery that may come in useful for futures travel incase the virus lingers in your system and causes future PCR tests you have to remain positive. These certificates are good for 180 days for foreign travel where testing is requiring for entry.
When we test ourselves, we always write on a piece of paper, name date and time, put it by the test result and photograph it. We have had to do this to attend our singing group. I don’t know whether this is official enough in other circumstances but no harm in doing it.
Hopefully, you heard that the CDC has just eased quarantining restrictions even more. I don’t know what rules are in place in Ireland, but if there is no quarantine, you should be able to get on the earliest available flight and it’s up to you whether you wear a mask or not on the plane I guess.
Oh, I’m so sorry, John. That would be so disappointing😟. Safe travels home!
British just this morning I got the official test with document saying I am positive. That should work for the insurance.
We just found out that we are no longer a Tauck guest at the hotel and breakfast is no longer included.
Crikey, that’s a bummer. Do you have to stay in your room?
British. I am sure I can leave the room and go walk around. I think we will take your advice and try to get a flight back as soon as we can.
John, my girlfriend who tested positive in Portugal a few months ago, discovered there that quarantining was on the honor system so she was able to do lots of site seeing because at that time you still required a negative test to return to the US. It certainly kept her sane. I hope you feel well enough to do this in Dublin, go and sit outside a pub and start downing those Guinness pints!
I guess you don’t have access to Paxlovid?
Good luck finding flights, it should certainly be easier to get something back to Newark, that’s a blessing
We will try to avoid Newark if possible. It has to be on United getting us back to Seattle
So sorry, John. That happened to us last month on the fifth day of our Week in Scotland trip. We had also booked ESW immediately following and I was not able to test negative before the start of that tour. A real bummer was that we had tickets for The Open, aka British Open, for the next day. Touring the UK and attending The Open had been a decades long bucket list item.
We had booked our own air at a pretty decent price, returning from London. United’s policy at that time, probably not enforced, was that you could not fly if you had tested positive within the last ten days. I’m sure changing our flight would have been pretty pricey, though I know insurance would have covered it. Rather than staying that long in the £450/night Edinburgh hotel, we managed to find a rental car and do our own ESW and return the car in London to catch our original flight. We didn’t feel like we should expose others on trains or buses. I did mask while around others and dined outdoors most of the time. We did remain in Edinburgh for the five day isolation period.
Driving on the left, the roundabouts and some of the narrow roads were challenging to say the least, but I’m awfully glad we did it. We did see several of the same sites Tauck did, though without the expert guides. We also saw other sites of interest to us, such as Inverary Castle, the Campbell ancestral home (my partner is a Campbell).
I don’t know how the insurance company is going to handle this. I’m hoping they will cover most of our expenses, but even if they don’t, it was worth it to us. I’d much rather have continued with the Tauck trip, but I think we made the most of a bad situation.
Perhaps that’s an option for you in Ireland.
Dottie: Without having any flying restrictions, we have been able to go ahead and change our United flights home for Tuesday.
We have done Ireland on our own before, renting a car and visiting most of the things Tauck is visiting. We were looking forward to enjoying the scenery from the bus, as when you drive yourself in Ireland it is quite a white knuckle experience.
We also stayed at Ashford Castle on our prior visit and were looking to repeat that experience. Oh well…
One thing I found with driving in the UK (done that numerous times) as the navigator, if you can’t figure out the exit you need to take from the roundabout, just keep driving around it.
Hello John S. I'm sorry you tested positive on day one. I was on the Week in Scotland tour in early June. Tour was great, then I left Edinburgh and flew to Athens, Greece to travel independently for a month. Two days after arriving in Greece I tested positive. I had symptoms for a couple days then I was fine, just fatigued. I didn't cancel my trip and go home. I suggest that if you are feeling OK, just go somewhere pleasant outside the city and relax before deciding to ditch the entire vacation. I hope you feel better.
Cathy_B - Thanks for the suggestion. Testing positive for Covid on day one is really a bummer. We have a few other trips lined up so right now going home is the top priority. As SueMS, who is also my traveling companion, supervisor, spouse etc., said above, we have been to Ireland before so this would have been somewhat of a repeat for us. We may decide to book this trip again in the future.
Dottie, I’m not sure how United could have even checked you tested positive.
SueMS …..yes roundabouts are great when you are not sure where you are, I miss them!
Sorry John, hope you feel well soon
Right, British. I’m sure United wouldn’t know. But I wasn’t ready to come home anyway, so it made a nice excuse. And we did finally figure out to keep going around the roundabout if we weren’t sure of the exit. It was still unnerving and I can’t say that I miss them.
I hope you test negative before you fly back as a courtesy to other passengers. Good luck and feel better.
I don’t think for one minute the majority of people would bother to test before getting on a plane it’s up to you to protect yourself however you think that may be.
I am following the CDC guidelines which say isolate for 5 days. The guidelines are saying you are most contagious from 2 days prior to 3 days after onset of symptoms. I most likely got infected at the crowded airport.
Have a safe trip home tomorrow John.