Surely they have been given the nod?

Two days ago it came to my attention that the Caravan and Motorhome Club (the CAMC) were opening most of their sites in England from 4th July. I logged onto their website, and saw that it was so. I then spent the next three hours making bookings for the second half of July, and late October/early November.

Both July bookings were at inland club sites - it was clearly no good trying to get into a coastal site, and I also had to bear in mind that the main roads would probably be clogged with traffic. Hell on earth is being stuck in a twenty-mile queue on a motorway. (I've had that on the M5 near Taunton, and never want a repeat experience) So they had to be sites not too far away that I could reach using lesser-used roads.

It took three hours because there were website queues to contend with, and I couldn't get my first choices of site, so had to start again after a rethink. I ended up with two weekday-only bookings near the Cotwolds and just off Salisbury Plain. Two club sites I hadn't been to before; it'll be interesting to see whether they are any good.

Next day, I rescheduled a Cornish booking that I'd had to cancel back in March, moving it to mid-September instead. The site manager accepted the rebooking but was sceptical about my actually being able to come, as the government hadn't yet said anything specific about people being able to travel to distant caravan sites, and I'd be coming all the way from Sussex. There was a booking frenzy going on, and his site was already filling up for months ahead, but he feared that many of the bookings would have to be cancelled simply because people wouldn't be allowed to haul their caravans across the country. In fact he thought that the CAMC were jumping the gun.

I wondered about that. But I thought that the club wouldn't go to the trouble and expense of opening dozens of sites across England from 4th July unless they had definite information that travel restrictions were going to be lifted - in other words, they'd had the nod from the government. Which argued, of course, that many decisions on how and when to ease virus-pandemic restrictions have already been taken, no doubt with an eye to how much gold is left in the country's treasure-chest. Such decisions can't be purely 'science-led'. I think the government is presently hoping that all the pandemic-beating trends will continue, and that excessive caution can be dispensed with. It is clearly important to get the economy going again by mid-summer. Certainly before businesses have to begin finding money to pay the salaries of their furloughed staff in August.

So I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to get away as now planned. Mind you, social distancing will still be in force everywhere. The CAMC explain that when arriving at any of their opened sites, there will be no going into the site office to pay. It'll all be done from the car, by phone. Members will have to abide by social-distancing rules when using site facilities. But that won't matter much to me. I may have to miss out on having a hot shower in the toilet block, but I can have the equivalent in the bathroom of my own caravan.

I'm not reliant on pubs and restaurants, and I'm happy to avoid crowded beaches, busy towns, and standard tourist honeypots. So it won't matter much if the local area is quieter than usual, or even mostly still shut. I'd hope to have afternoon tea and cake, or maybe the odd ice-cream, but even those aren't essential for my holiday. I only want to get away and breathe fresh air elsewhere than Sussex.