Airlock went quiet on day 12 of a five gallon cider — finished or stuck, and can I bottle before I travel?

Rough timeline from a lot of five gallon batches: vigorous phase four to seven days, gravity basically stable somewhere between day ten and day twenty at that temperature, clearing over the following month, and it tastes thin and sharp for the first couple of months before it settles. Plain juice with no added sugar ferments essentially all the way out, so mine finish very dry, right around or just under 1.000. If yours is sitting at 1.010 it is not finished, it is either cold-stalled or the yeast has quit, and bottling that is how you end up with glass shrapnel in a cupboard.

I bottled at 1.012 because the airlock had been quiet for four days and I was impatient in precisely the way you are being. Came back to two burst bottles, cider up the wall, and a cupboard that smelled of apples for a year. Cost me about thirty quid of bottles and a Saturday of cleaning, and my partner still brings it up. Do the hydrometer readings.

The airlock tells you about your seal and your garage temperature and nothing else. Take a gravity reading now, take another three days later, and if they match you are done. That is the only evidence that counts and it costs you two minutes.

Disagreeing with the premise that you need to bottle before you travel at all. Cider is perfectly happy sitting on the yeast in a sealed fermenter for another two or three weeks, and it will be clearer and better for it. Ten days away is nothing. Bottle when you are home, unhurried, with two matching gravity readings behind you.

Buy a second hydrometer while you are ordering. They cost almost nothing and they break at the least convenient possible moment, usually the evening you finally get round to bottling.

If you are thinking about backsweetening at bottling, that is a completely separate problem, and the same yeast will happily eat the new sugar inside a sealed bottle. Either accept it bone dry or read up on stabilising properly before you go near it.