It’s February and the sun is shining and we are half way through the Winter Season,  we can see the News in China and say things like “imagine all those people forced to stay in their homes. Oh how awful that they can’t travel, good job they are so far away from us so we can continue our lives as normal”

Bookings keep coming in and it looks like March and April will be the best months The Orange House has ever had, a few sleepless nights trying to remap the rooms to make sure all the groups can fit in. 

Rich will need a full rucksack of high energy bars as he is going to be guiding more or less the whole of April, 2 days off if he is lucky!

A great team of “Oranges” are all arrived and ready for a busy end of season. All looking forward to some great climbing on the days off!

BOOM!!!

Fast forward to now and surely the past 6 months is fake news! Can we wake up and take a shower and realise Bobby isn’t really dead! (sorry for those too young for Dallas).

The first bad news we received was our local bar, Serenas, was made to close, “thats awful” we said but we are still open, phew! 

A few emails from people due later in the month, checking all was ok, “yes” we answered “we are still open and don’t worry this will not last long or get any worse”.  Never have we been so wrong.

Everyone cancelled, all end of season groups, 2 Schools, 3 Universities, the British Army, Swedish Club, German Yoga group all gone! No way could this be happening, we are all made to stay home and really stay home. 

Police on the streets making sure we only went to the closest supermarket. So quiet that is erie. Shopping and you could be the only car on the road, like a scene from a zombie movie! 

 

No sport, no climbing, no walking, weeks of the same. Shop or chemist and that was it.

Now the emails are from the summer villa rental guests, all desperate for information. How could we answer, no one knew what was coming.  What choice did we have but to give everyone the chance to change the dates. Slowly over the next few months everyone swapped to 2021. Great for the guests but not so great for us as now we have many weeks next year that we can’t take guests which means cash flow issues. 

September is an amazing season for Deep Water Solo, climbing over the crystal clear med, cold beers and great fun with like minded people. But who’s coming, who is going to risk booking a flight?