travel tales

Posted on episode 267

Travel Advisory

It seems almost ironic that the day I set aside to sum up my year in travel, the government of my country leaked that they’ve decided to reinstitute yet another travel advisory sometime in the next day or so.

Here we go again.

Or, really, here we don’t go anywhere.

What is travel anyhow? Getting away from your house? Your city? Your country?

Did you travel in 2021?

I’ve been fortunate enough that despite multiple ebbs and flows of restrictions and limitations we’ve made our way around our beautiful province this past year.

In particular, a couple week-long trips to the mountains this past summer broke up the monotony of working from home and the never ending bad news cycle.

We packed up and spent a week exploring the world famous sights around Banff, hiking through day trips up mountains and through canyons and into cute little restaurants for elaborate lunches.

We spent another week in the mountain town of Jasper later in the summer, doing more hiking, meeting old friends for wild runs, and dabbling in the icy waters afloat in our new inflatable kayak.

For the last couple decades we’ve been fortunate enough to be travellers of a more worldly sort. The year before the pandemic we spent nearly three weeks between Scotland and Ireland. We tripped through some of America’s interesting cities like New York, Los Angeles, Maui, Las Vegas and Orlando. For a couple years we got into cruising and snorkeling off the back of a boat and from exotic island beaches. One summer we even donned our winter clothes and spent ten days touring Iceland. It has been a life spent on experience rather than things.

The past couple years have been tough and we tried to make up as best we could with local adventures, and made those adventures as satisfying as possible given the realities of a locked down world.

Tomorrow the news is either going to be bad or really bad. Either we’re spending the holidays worried, or we’re spending them locked down at home once again. It’s the right thing, I know. I believe. But it doesn’t make the yearning for distant adventures any easier to bear.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 236

Travel: Disney in the Time of COVID

My wife has been waking up at three thirty in the morning lately. Deliberately. Her alarm goes off, she activates her phone, logs into the Disneyworld website, and queues up her virtual reservation system trying to get us a dinner seating at a reasonable time and place … for some time next year.

I’m not a planner.

For example, when a couple years back I ditched the official tour group, our dance studio travelling companions, for a couple days to head off in advance to Ireland leaving them behind in Scotland, I arrived in Dublin, checked into my hotel and then, simply, went for a walk.

No real destination planned. No expectations. No reservations. Not even a proper bus ticket to get me back to the start. Just me and my feet, wandering.

I plan vacations, of course. But more often than not when I get there I like to explore, take things as they come, and see what the trip presents me.

It’s great.

But here’s the thing …

We’re planning a trip to Florida for the new year.

We’re even crossing an international border, no less.

And I assumed the planning part, including booking flights, hotels, and a car rental was complete. (In fact I assumed it was complete almost two years ago when we booked it the first time but then it got cancelled and we had all these travel credits and … deep breath!)

I was wrong. In 2022 a trip to the magical magic kingdom is rife with a less-than-cavalier planning problem. You can’t just show up. You can’t “wing it.” You can’t arrive without a charged phone with the Disney app, nor lacking a catalog of ride times, neither walking in out of the parking lot hoping for anything but a day of disappointment and disaster … which brings me back to three-thirty this morning, when my wife’s alarm went off.

See, between crowd limits and general popularity, it seems as though Disneyworld has its own planning problem: tens of thousands of people arrive each and every day into their parks and all those people want to enter, play, ride, shop, eat, and exit to go back to their hotels. Rinse. Repeat.

In order to get a meal that isn’t served at a kiosk from a paper plate, we need a reservation, and reservations open so many days in advance at six in the morning Florida time, fill up in literal minutes, and we’re not on Florida time. So, if she waits until the morning … hello quick serve pizza slices for supper.

See, guys like me throw off the flow.

Disney can’t just have everyone … or really anyone … showing up and wandering, no plans, no structure, lacking expectations or reservations.

In fact, those literal reservations need to be made months in advance, setting up plans about which rides you plan to be riding on which days and which meals you intend to eat at what time and when and where … and perhaps even why…

All that spontaneous family fun, it turns out, needs to be carefully orchestrated months before the suitcases come out of storage. I already know what days and times we’ll be standing in line for that Star Wars ride or It’s a Small World, or just Starbucks to keep my eyes open with a venti coffee to help keep me alert as I reach the point of exhaustion from the meticulously planned vacation.

Partly I blame COVID. The need to organize people flow around health rules has exacerbated the drive towards app-driven, technology-backed, ultra-planned everything.

Partly it is also a symptom of going somewhere nearly universally popular.

And partly, I take the blame as someone who doesn’t thrive in this type of vacation … and taking one for the “team” so that the family can have a long-planned trip.

Next time, though, I’m just going to leave my phone at home and go get lost in the woods.

Posted on episode 233

Travel: Fruits, Wines, and a Weekend Half

Two years ago this past weekend the world was a very different place.

The world was different enough that we had no issues hopping into the car, driving for nearly ten hours straight, and wending our way across the prairies, over the rocky mountain passes, and into the verdant Okanagan Valley in nearby British Columbia.

for whatever one photo is worth:

The official travel excuse was that I had signed up for an October half marathon in Kelowna. Yet my wife has a healthy collection of extended family who have located to the micro-climate over the past ten years and we were due for a visit.

As much as Canada sometimes deserves its reputation as a vast semi-arctic wasteland, even the locale in a radius hundreds of kilometers from where I sit writing this (which is frozen and snow-covered for half the year), there are places in this vast and diverse country which are fertile and lush.

One of those less-often-frozen zones is the Okanagan Valley, a longitudinally positioned string of deep lakes tucked between the high peaks of the continental divide rocky mountains to the east and the lusher coastal mountains nearer to Vancouver to the west.

The weather-stabilizing effects of this location and the nearby water features means that a climate zone amenable to ample fruit tree orchards and sprawling vineyards exists and makes the region both desirable as a home for hundreds of thousands and a tourist destination for multiples more.

I would move there in a heartbeat given the right opportunity, but two years ago we merely wedged ourselves into the tourist category.

Two days in the area was barely enough to get a taste of everything, though.

On Saturday we visited the local famer’s market in the morning, ate lunch on the pier, collected my race package in the park, wandered through a corn maze on a hobby farm, and visited a wine tasting at a vineyard (pictured) along the road to the house where we had set up camp.

On Sunday I toured a twenty-one point one kilometer stretch of waterfront and urban streetways on foot and recorded one of my better half marathon times in the perfect autumn weather, before slipping back to shower, change and pack the car for the push back across the mountains and home.

Our intention was to make it an annual trip.

A run.

A visit.

Good food.

Fresh fruit and great wine.

Somehow though, the last two years has made the world a very different place and, like so many others around that world, even nearby adventures have fallen to the bottom of our possibilities list.

Posted on episode 227

Hiking: Johnston Canyon

During the summer of 2021 we took a pair of casual family vacations to the mountains. The first and more southern of these was a trip to the proximity of Banff National Park. Four nights in Canmore, Alberta a mountain town just outside of the national park boundary served as the staging point for a number of family hiking days in Canada’s keynote wilderness area.

for whatever one photo is worth:

The effort it required us to reach the trailhead of this meandering family hike belied the apparent popularity of this mountain attraction.

Johnston Canyon is among the original generation of tourist hikes in this part of the National Park. Where most hikes in the area are marked by a small parking lot and a wooden sign at the trailhead, Johnston Canyon had a large paved parking lot, a tourist information kiosk, a plumbed bathroom facility, a teahouse, an ice cream shack, a restaurant with a balcony, and sat across the road from a medium-sized hotel. All this roughly thirty kilometers outside of Banff, down a secondary highway (which happened to also be partially closed to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists during the pandemic) requiring a lengthy (but very scenic) drive to reach.

The canyon itself is the showcase of the hike.

A small river with a series of small waterfalls has spent millions of years cutting a jagged gash across the face of the mountain, and the multitude of family hikers walk alongside, into, and over said canyon in an effort to reach the epic upper falls (or further for more adventurous sorts with more time on their hands to complete the extra four kilometers in each direction.)

To assist with the experience of closely encountering the scenery (and likely to avoid losing tourists to off-trail tumbles over cliffs, et cetera) a large stretch of the path is composed of suspended walkways clinging to the cliffs, concrete and steel spiked into the granite and welcoming tourists to explore nature in a kind of sanitized yet surreal safety mode.

We strolled up to the various waterfalls, took many photos, and found ourselves carrying the dog along most of these steel walkways (thank goodness she’s only four kilograms) because the gaps and the noise were a little too overwhelming for her little puppy brain.

On the way up we seemed to be ahead of the bulk of the crowd, only meeting a handful of descending adventurers. But on our own descent we passed literally hundreds of people, usually in groups of two, three or four, often want to meet our dog as they passed, and all slowly making their way to bear witness to and snap a selfie with the marvel of nature.

I find that it is a conflicted sort of thing for me to visit these places.

On the one hand they are popular because they are amazing and accessible and worth visiting, and have been that way for a long time, allowing many people to experience something awesome and inspiring.

On the other hand, the Disneyland-style crowds one can encounter in a popular hiking area spoils the very thing that one goes there to see, the majesty of nature and the tranquility of such an epic space.

Maybe if it wasn’t so hard to reach, it would be more of these all of things, and probably both better and worse for it.