At this point in our time in the UK we had been notified that the company was pulling expats back home due to pandemic related issues. We were very disappointed that our time was quickly coming to close and that the pandemic had nullified much of our plans for European travel. However, there was also an overwhelming sense of relief to finally be going home, back to our family, back to America! I don't recommend taking on a pandemic in a foreign country.
A trip to London had been planned many times over, but the pandemic kept ebbing away at our opportunities. Knowing that another lockdown was soon pending, we planned the trip, booked it, and waited cautiously ahead of the October break in hopes that we'd get to go. In the week leading up to the trip the government announced that a new circuit breaker would be beginning soon, with the start date to be announced in the following days. At this news, I contacted my travel agent and cancelled all the plans thinking that there'd be no point in traveling to London if everything was closed. Just two days before the planned trip date the government announced that circuit breaker would be focused in the most affected areas rather than country wide. No doubt, this was an effort to try to help keep a dwindling economy stumbling forward and not take another tremendous loss at the hands of another lockdown. And as luck would have it, London was not scheduled to go into the circuit breaker. I called my travel agent back that night and rebooked everything. We packed up the next day and caught a nearly empty train to London!