Over tea in our ground floor quarantine apartment off of Thurcroft Hall we discussed where and how to go. There had been more than a month of movement– slow and fast, surreal and mundane, dramatic, undramatic, all to arrive at that full-stop.
     We paced the grounds of the Hall and drank our Yorkshire tea with milk and sugar. The two options were North or South. The English border control agent had warned us we’d be turned around at the ferry or the tunnel or the airport. In August of 2020 there were quite a few contradictory or vague guidelines about who was allowed in Europe, but they seemed to agree that Americans were not.
     Facing the prospect of a winter in the UK, Madeline sketched out our options: working as farmhands, wild camping in Scotland, artist residencies, intentional communities. I gamed out the probabilities of making it onto the continent by different routes and from there how and where and when to proceed out of the EU towards Turkey. Britain would exit the union by the end of the year. If Israel wouldn’t open its borders, the best we could likely do is overstay our visas in Greece or Spain for the winter, waiting for the spring, but many options were on the table those days.
     In between the rains we walked the little roads and the fields that covered up the old slag heaps, never straying too far from our quarantine for fear of a visit from the police, but the visit never came. Tired but ready, we hadn’t really begun traveling yet. All that movement had just led us to the starting gate. Everything was still in-theory. So, we headed for the French border, to the first fork in the road, to try our luck.