Why the Isle of Wight is the perfect place for a 'bubble' break with parents
We were supposed to be at a wedding in the South of France. Instead, we were standing on a street corner in Portsmouth with two suitcases and enough antibacterial products to sterilise Porton Down.
Our first night out of London since February had kicked off with Wightlink Ferries (wightlink.co.uk) telling us we had missed our Friday evening crossing to the Isle of Wight and the only slot left was at 7am the next day. It’s like this every Friday, they shrugged, uninterested, as we faced a night sleeping in the car on one of the hottest days of the year. The car then broke down, and we cursed our staycation plans.
Stress levels had been high even before we found ourselves stuck in Wightlink’s loading bay. My parents, who hadn’t stepped foot in a shop since the start of lockdown, had also had enough of London and decided to join us on our trip to the Isle of Wight to see my future in-laws. Boris Johnson was urging people to take a staycation, and we found a picturesque hotel by the sea in the village of Seaview.
A seaside escape felt like a great way out of our mutual pandemic funk until a few days before the trip, when I found myself frantically googling whether there had been any cases in hotels and if staying in one was too risky for people in their 60s. Was it worth it just for a weekend by the sea? I called the Seaview Hotel for the umpteenth time, asking if my parents could be put in a room that hadn’t been occupied for a few days. "I’m just being extra careful as my dad is almost 70," I explained to them, much to his horror.
Eager not to put our parents at risk (or those on the island who have been largely shielded from the pandemic by geography) a two-night seaside break turned into a military-style logistical operation even before we arrived. We shielded ourselves for a week before, just to be extra safe, and tried researching the protocols local hotels and restaurants had imposed since reopening their doors.
It felt strange to be wondering if a quaint British seaside town was safe enough for our parents to visit when just six months earlier we had been trekking through thick rainforest in Rwanda with my future in-laws, both in their 70s, looking for gorillas just kilometers from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
A year before I had been travelling across India with my 67-year-old dad and sister, taking sleeper trains, exploring Goa and visiting the slums in Mumbai. Now we feared our enthusiasm to visit a hotel so soon after they reopened on July 4 had made our families pandemic guinea pigs and were left wondering if perhaps we should have exercised more patience.
We were not the only ones eager for a change of scene. Our journey from hell – resulting in us leaving the car in Portsmouth and instead using the excellent Hovertravel (hovertravel.co.uk), the last remaining commercial hovercraft service in the world – gave us an early indication of just how quickly tourism on the island has bounced back.
The testing ground for the original NHS contact-tracing app, the Isle of Wight has had no new coronavirus cases since July 6. There was just one case reported in the two weeks leading up to June 26, while May saw the island's ‘R’ rate drop faster than any other area. Although the Isle of Wight is sometimes accused of being stuck in the 1980s, a stereotype local MP Bob Seely calls a “lazy” view from uninformed “Down From Londons (DFLs)”, the hotels, pubs and restaurants we visited were very up to date when it came to safety precautions.
So when my mum, who has spent much of lockdown sterilising packaging and ironing newspapers, arrived at the hotel armed with a bottle of Flash, her own pillow cases and an enormous variety of masks, gloves and hand sanitiser, it hardly seemed necessary.
We quickly felt safe at the Seaview Hotel, freeing our thoughts of coronavirus fears as we headed to the waterfront for a bracing swim and made dinner plans (the Boathouse pub, on the edge of Seaview, does delicious fish and chips). With coastal walks on our doorstep it was easy to bring our two families together while also keeping them physically apart.
Seaview is an ideal base to explore the island’s walks – Priory Bay is particularly beautiful and eating fresh crab sandwiches on the beach in nearby Bembridge made for the perfect socially-distanced lunch. Further afield, in Freshwater, we enjoyed a scenic coastal walk followed by a cup of tea at Dimbola Lodge, the home of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and somewhere I hadn’t been since I was a child when we used to stay in the self-catering cottages of Farringford (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s former home).
As we put on our masks and headed back to the ferry after our weekend together, our car still in Portsmouth, we stood on the deck and watched the island fade into the distance. It was just the break we needed, we all agreed, dousing our hands in alcohol gel.
Read the full review of The Seaview Hotel.
