Tag Archives: travelling

Dreams of Flight and Fancy

When I was growing up, I dreamed of going to places like Italy and France. I always thought they were out of my reach, far too expensive.
Before I could become the traveller I wanted to be in my 20s, life interfered with much stupid/tragic/disruptive stuff. Travelling didn’t happen beyond my roadtripping days, where I saw half of Canada and the whole west coast of North America, from Alaska to Mexico.
In hindsight, I understand why I got so dramatically derailed. I can say truthfully now that one’s propensity for having regrets grows exponentially with age. That’s hindsight for you. With wisdom comes the acceptance that there is much we could have done better, learned faster.
Staring down age 41, I have some of that regret, these days.
Surprisingly, not as much as I would have expected, given how unhappy I was, and for how long. As “old” as I feel, I also feel far younger than I would have thought for 40. I have excitement that I can still change things. I also have a sense that everything has kind of gone just as it should.
After all, becoming a world traveller in my 40s will mean I’m old enough to understand and appreciate all the culture around me. I’m wise enough to see what contentment is, and just how little is required to attain it. I’m cynical enough to look behind the curtains and ignore the tourist veneer. I’m confident and defensive enough to stroll off the well-trod path and find the “real” people and places behind the cultures I’m visiting.
I’ve been watching all my friends travel, and none of them have done it in the way I think I will. That’s the beauty of travel. It’s a world of options for a world of people. Literally.
photo

The Great Wandering Act of ’79

When I was soon to be six years old, we were on our first big family trip to Disneyland in ‘79. On a daytrip to Tijuana, I meandered off. I mean, not just a few feet away — I walked the hell off. I was gone for hours. My parents thought I was kidnapped. They waited to file a missing person’s report in the then-corrupt-as-hell-and-lacking-a-PR-department Mexican police station for two hours. My mother had $500 cash stolen from her IN THE POLICE STATION. This was in ‘79, man! Oh, Mexico. That’s a lot of dough.
Meanwhile, me, the absent 5-year-old, I was having a grand old time. I wandered the streets, talked to strangers. I bought a giant bag of candy and made a MILLION little Mexican friends who followed me around as I got them high on free candy.
Then I found my way into a street market and managed to barter with a vendor for a fringed leather cowgirl vest I would cherish for the next two years, followed by a Seiko watch.
I don’t remember how I reconnected with my parents, but I went back with no spending money, a candy-full tummy, a new vest, and a watch.
That afternoon, I learned about how sometimes people stole children and sold the kids to bad people. I never wandered off again. It was pretty fun while it lasted, though.

You Are What You Do

If this premise that our personalities are fully formed by age seven is true, then I guess my little wandering act says a lot about who I should be today.
It’s long overdue that I finally shift gears to be that wandering-act girl again.
When it comes to watching how all my friends are travelling, it’s helping me to decide the sort of traveller I wish to be. I don’t want to be breezing through places with only two to four weeks to see the region (or worse, less). I want to stay put, be a part of the place, become privy to the rhythm of their streets.
I see people shit on others who take trips and only see touristy things, but if I was confined to only a week or two, I would fall victim to the same dull scheme. That’s why I fancy the idea of 5 to 6 months spent per place. As a writer, I love the idea of really getting to know areas.
I’m also not deciding on a plan of attack. I want to see where the flow leads me. We live in an age where you don’t need to speak the language. Photo apps translate foreign-language signs, for crying out loud! Dictionaries and translators will speak for you at the press of a button.
Aside from medical vaccines, money, and visas, there’s no reason why one should be limited where they travel today. It’s an open-door world, thanks to gadgetry.
lone tree hill

Times Have Changed, As They Do

The world I thought was once too expensive to see has become far cheaper than where I now live. If I set the only parameter as being “must be 30% cheaper than where I live today” it seems as if more than half the world is an option for me.
It’s a strange phenomenon to go from a cheap little Canadian city to the most expensive in Canada, and top 100 in the world.
It seems an unrealistic goal, to spend my life travelling for a few years yet live for 30-40% cheaper than I presently do, but according to friends who’ve spent a year or more abroad, it’s not unrealistic at all.
It’s about choices, doing a little research, and being willing to live with less.
When you’re travelling, you don’t need entertainment. Your life is constantly new, entertaining. Stopping, pressing “pause” to spend time writing, or just wandering for photography, will become all-consuming. Writing, photography, they don’t cost money. They just take time.
Time I have too seldom of today. That’s my “pause” for this morning. Dreaming about the next phase. It’s taken some edge off some depressing world news I’d read before breakfast.
But later today I get to be a small-scale traveller as I go visit my brother in a town I’ve never seen before. Something new is always fun, even close to home.

Is Happiness a Place?

photo 1I’ve watched three episodes of Bourdain’s Parts Unknown since last night and now my thoughts are consumed by food and culture.
It surprises me how much I’ve been thinking about food, culture, and the next phase of my life — in which I sell most everything I own and take up the wanderer’s lifestyle for hopefully the next five years.
I had to write a foreword for my cookbook last week and it made me more contemplative than I expected. What did I value in life? Why? What did I want more of? And I found myself echoing in the words I was writing. I too was lost “in the whizz-whizz/whoosh-whoosh pace of city life” I’d been writing about. I work too much, live too little. But I have a goal in mind: Five years abroad, and a year to go before I want it underway. The clock is ticking. The end is in sight. The race is on. Yada, yada.
Watching Bourdain wax poetic about the timeless lifestyles of Granada, Spain, or Ecuador, or Peru, or Croatia, or… It all makes me realize how far off the mark life is here in North America, or where I’ve been living. Or how I’ve been living. Life here, though, is all about the Benjamins. Or would be, if we had American currency.
With one of the most costly lifestyles in the English-speaking world, Vancouver (and therefore Victoria, where it’s only marginally cheaper) has suddenly become a struggle to live on a budget. A lot of people I know, if they can work from home and aren’t tied down, are taking the risk of living abroad. Some have made permanent ventures of it. And why not? If one can tap into a different lifestyle in a place that, after so long hamstrung in Vancouver, where life feels like a vacation because everything feels new and shiny for a year or more — well, why not? And if it’s 30-60% cheaper? Fuck, yeah.
I understand that we have it pretty good in Canada, and that’s where our money goes, but I also think it’s pretty ethnocentric to make bold claims like “best place on Earth.” After all, there’s a lifestyle in places like Spain and Ecuador and other fantastic places where they do have long vacations every year, and they focus on life first/work last, and they celebrate real food and wine and nature, and they do it all for cheaper than we do here, while still having a nice social safety net for the citizens.
We don’t have a monopoly on lifestyles. In many places, living really is pretty good, and they’re honestly too busy living life to bother trying to sell an image of it. Here, it feels like it’s so fast-paced and distracted that we’re constantly being reminded of just how GREAT everything is and how WOW SPIFFY our world is so we don’t start questioning how ridiculous it is that we have among the least amount of vacation time in the world, with the longest hours.
It’s like that time a friend read The Secret and told me what a powerful thing it was, and I should read it, blah blah blah. And I said, “Dude. You’re not happy with your job, where you live, and your relationship is in tatters. Prove to me that The Secret works by fixing your fucked-up life and oozing happy-happy/joy-joy, and then maybe I’ll buy the book.”
If life here was so sensational and happiness was the natural byproduct of it, do you think we’d be selling Xanax and Prozac like it was going out of style? Do you think self-help books would be so endemic? If life’s so amazing here, why do we need to keep being reminded about it?
When I was living in Vancouver, I kept telling people I wasn’t happy there anymore. Everyone said I was nuts, it’s the best place on the planet. Well, I can tell you wholeheartedly that selling the dream ain’t the same as delivering the dream, and for me, Lotusland just wasn’t delivering.
photo 2But maybe I’ve just got a restless heart. This time and place, it’s not right for me. I don’t know where is, but it ain’t here, not now. Not today. I think, for me, the joy will come from looking. From going to one place and being blown away and thinking “Nothing can ever top this,” and then, boom, next town, next country — “Nothing can ever top this.”
What if there is no place better than where I am today? What if, for the rest of my life I remember about the magical two years I lived in a magical neighbourhood?
Well, that could happen. Sure. But it’s a pretty big planet packed with a lot of wow, and I’m pretty sure things get amazing anywhere there’s mountains, trees, ocean, good wine, beautiful food, and kind people.
Happiness, for me, is a state of being. Having the time to be in the moment, not distracted, not paying a ton of money for an experience. A quiet place, a few kind people, the ability to speak my mind (or stay silent), a great glass of wine or a tall lemonade or strong coffee, some nature near me or surrounding me. Usually many of these criteria get met when I get to feel “happy”. It’s the recipe for happiness we hear so much about. Or my recipe, anyhow.
But to get there, to have that, I need to spend another year working like a dog to set my plan in play. Taking moments like this to think about the what-ifs of living abroad, the potential that life might hold, it makes knowing I’m working through another Saturday and Sunday all worthwhile.
That balance will come. For a little while, it means I have to prove how much I want it. And so I shall. With that, it’s time to do some work.

Notes from the Mainland

For nearly a week, I’ve been on the Mainland.
It is, for me, a reckoning — of incomplete sorts, I guess.
While I’m comfortable here and have no problems getting around, know all the places and such, it just doesn’t feel like home anymore.
I’d expected that, of course, ‘cos it’d kind of stopped feeling that way before I even moved, but now this is sort of a New Normal. It’s now UnHome.
As I sip my Kicking Horse coffee, I’m thinking. If this feels less like home, then I’m hoping the opposite is true as I ride my ferry back to my island tonight. I hope I go “home” in my soul as much as I do with my luggage.
Maybe I would have enjoyed Vancouver more if it’d been less rainy this week, or if I’d not had a sinus infection for my whole visit, or my allergies weren’t being stupid. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But that’s not the case. I’ve been under the weather, and really not up for adventure.
Still, it was nice. Saw my friends, my family, and a whole lot of other folks. But that’s all it was for me. “Nice.”
It was also draining, exhausting, and frustrating at different times, because that’s how “the big city” feels to me these days.
Maybe after more “Rat Race Detox,” I’ll be excited to return to the bustle. Today, though, I’m excited to leave it.
Soon, later, I go home. A bus to the valley to see my folks once more, get a lift to my boat, ride the ferry home, and then I’m island-bound for another two months.
Naturally, I’ll be back. People who are so important to who I am — friends who were there for the last two decades, my brother, Dad, stepmom — are all here, and I’ll be quite happy to visit them, knowing my good hosts have comfy beds and accommodating homes.

***

Next time, I’m not going downtown. I’m packing less, and nothing fancy. I’ll bring my bike, play tourist in some of Vancouver’s outlying areas, and get a refresher on those parts of why Vancouver’s caught the whole world’s eyes.
But I don’t need the concrete jungle, the droning of traffic, or the grumbling masses that comprise “big-city” life.

***

So, there I was, finishing my over-easy eggs, when I was struck by the desire to record my moment of uncertainty. Enter, le bloggedy-blog.
What will it be like when I return to Victoria for my first time as a resident?
Because, if this isn’t home anymore, is it home THERE? And, if it isn’t, then what does that leave me — displaced?
As I type this, I’m just a few blocks from where I spent a lot of time over a couple years with one of my long-time exes. It’s strange. Much of my time spent here was at the end of another era of my life, before and after I moved to the Yukon. Now, it’s where one of my two best friends bought a home that his family will be growing into for years. I approve, for them. What a great place to be a kid.
For me, it’ll be a weird headtrip when I visit for a while. It’ll be nice to think of this as Their World one day, and not as I do now, which is Where I Used To Be A Lot.
I sit here, in this ‘hood, thinking about how different I was then, 15 years ago. How much has gone down. How much hasn’t happened that I’d dreamed of. How much still could. How much I’m trying to find that girl I thought was awesome then.
This is an area, I think, that held a lot of promise for me for a while. My brother lived here off an on for years as well. And, over that time, my life spiralled down, sort of just into a place I didn’t want to be.
Now, I’m still not where I’d like to be, but I’m so much closer to it than I’ve been in years.
Funny, my brother last lived around here when my mother’s death was still fresh. I haven’t hung out here in all that time. Coming back to this area sort of makes it clear to me now just how far afield I was, way back when, and how I’ve found the right path in this new era.
I’m packed and ready to go, but my head is miles away already.

***

At this point, I don’t feel like I’ve made any mistakes leaving Vancouver. Coming back cements that for me.
I know I’m at the cusp of a new time. My time. My “transition” to my new Coastal life is further along. Change is afoot.
Whatever Victoria is to me now, Vancouver just ain’t home anymore.
Sometimes, figuring out where you’re meant to be is better when you simply establish where you oughtn’t be. That’s all the start you need: Don’t be there.
And I’m not “there” anymore.

***

So, tomorrow, I’ll wake in my bed, in my apartment. I’ll be able to sleep naked, pad around, do all those things you want locks on your door before you do.
That’s home enough for now — life a few blocks from the wild ocean, miles and miles from the Mainland.
Soon, I’ll either know I’m home, or that my journey to find Home will be continuing indefinitely.
But maybe, just maybe, the ferry ride home, as the boat sails through BC’s incredible “Active Pass,”  a lightness will find me, a sense of calm will settle upon me, and I’ll just know.
Maybe. (I hope so.)