When my wife and I headed to Italy last fall, it was a very much needed trip. Lots had happened in our lives over the previous year (really, two years, but who’s counting?) and the idea of leaving the continent and spending a couple of weeks wandering around Milan, Turin, the Barolo area and Lake Como sounded like the slice of heaven we both needed. To make it a touch more special, we sprung for the really fancy seats on our flight to Milan and starting crushing Champagne as soon as we could.
I love my annual baseball trip. Last summer, with eleven stadiums and cities left for me to visit to have seen a major league game everywhere baseball is played, I decided to head to Cincinnati. It was to have been my baseball trip in 2020 on account of a ridiculously cheap plane ticket I had found. I had done just enough looking at the city before the world shut down to know that there would be plenty to keep me interested for a few days there. Cincinnati may not strike you as a “must go” destination, but as a baseball fan, there was plenty to like. A downtown stadium I could walk to, six games in five days on account of one double-header, and some fan apathy due to a number of down years for their team that made my tickets pretty inexpensive.
It has been a year since I lost both my mom and dad in a span of 20 days. I think, like a lot of people, I underestimated the effect grief would have on me. After the difficult process of cleaning out and selling their house all while trying to stay engaged with work from New Brunswick, I was exhausted. In hindsight, I should have taken some time off to recover, but the first break I gave myself was a short trip to Montreal to get away from everything and unplug.
I wasn’t thoughtful about choosing Montreal. I had decided on Vancouver for an escape, but the hotels were so expensive that I ended up booking my trip to this city that has been so much a part of my life over the years. I was so tired in organizing all of this that it didn’t even occur to me that I’d be away for what would have been my dad’s 85th birthday. More on that in a bit. But I was “with it” enough to book a seat on the left side of the plane for this view. Olympic Stadium on the final approach brought a tear to my eye.
Over the course of living in Saskatoon, we have become part of a great group of friends who take pleasure in wine tasting. That’s a fancy way of saying a group of us gets together a few times a year to enjoy wine, usually with food, sometimes on someone’s patio and sometimes in a favourite wine store in Saskatoon. We open a few bottles, then a few more, and the laughs begin to flow. Over the pandemic, we turned our group virtual for a spell and those zoom wine tasting nights felt like nights out and kept us going until things returned to normal. In those zoom wine tastings, we talked a lot about wine travel and as a group have now attended the international wine festival in Vancouver on two occasions including last year.
For this most recent wine trip, my wife and I headed to Vancouver a day before our group activities started for a bit of “us” time. On a cold, rainy night, we tucked into the cozy Chickadee Room cocktail bar for a couple of happy hour drinks and the free gluten free fried chicken that comes along with your order. This was a great first stop – excellent cocktails, tender juicy chicken all in a retro vibes bar that warmed us up.
They were simpler times in so many ways. Crossing the border into the USA wasn’t something that made my stomach churn like it did for a trip I just took to Washington. And while I’m debating with myself how frequently I’ll be back down to the USA for pleasure over the next little while, there was no such hesitation on my last two visits to Seattle. Seattle feels a lot like Vancouver and I’ve been there enough that I have a good sense of the city and a few favourite haunts by now.
The first trip, my wife made the journey there with me while I was attending a conference, and it was fun to both see the city through her eyes and to also experience some new things with her. A tradition we have on all of our trips is some form of Yahtzee championship. We spent a couple of hours at TeKu Tavern + Cafe and while I enjoyed a couple of delicious pints of Washington state beer, I demolished my wife in our Yahtzee matches. She was terribly disappointed at how the games went.
In many ways, any looking back on 2024 is going to be, at best, a melancholy one for me. Not that there weren’t many amazing and awe inspiring things I encountered as part of my travels… but in many cases this past year, my travels were a lot about coping with and taking some next steps on a journey of grief after losing both of my parents in the spring. With that said, here are my favourite memories and moments from my travels over the past year.
(1) Cocktail night in Vancouver – Simpler times. We were in Vancouver for an international wine festival with friends. It was a cold, rainy evening. My wife and I ventured out to two cocktail bars – the Chickadee Room and Keefer Bar – and enjoyed an amazing selection of drinks (and the free happy hour gluten free fried chicken at Chickadee Bar!). The night was silly, simple and cozy, and we still talk about revisiting these places on our next trip to Vancouver.
On May 24th of this year, I stood in the driveway of what was my parents’ house, miraculously closed the tailgate of a Tetris-like packed SUV and climbed behind the wheel. In the passenger seat was my wife who had so expertly packed the car as full as it would go with as many of an assortment of items of what remained from the lives of my mom and dad. Their respective lives had both ended so abruptly, and without warning, over the previous month and a half. I remember glancing over at my wife, our newly inherited dog on her lap, putting the car in reverse and taking one last look at a house we had emptied and packed and organized for sale in just a couple of short weeks, and if I squinted, I’m sure I would have seen ghosts of my parents’ lives… at least the parts I saw on my visits to Bathurst.
August 6, 2006 is the date I first set foot in Brussels. I have written about the inauspicious start that trip had, but even after quite an arrival calamity, that one trip changed the way I view a lot of things in my life and set me on a course to explore and travel as much as possible. When I set foot again in Brussels last year, more than seventeen years had passed. A lot had changed, as is the case when seventeen years pass. But near as I can remember, the feeling of awe wasn’t one of them while standing in the middle of what I now have more authority to claim as the most beautiful public square in Europe. The Grand Place stopped me in my tracks in 2023 much as it did on my first night there so many years ago.
When I boarded a train in Brussels to make my way to Ghent for a day trip to explore the city, something felt off. Sometimes when I’m on a solo trip a touch of loneliness or homesickness creeps in and it usually dissolves pretty quickly. As I disembarked in Ghent and started walking toward the historic city centre I chalked up the feeling to the grey skies of the day and the threat of rain and put it out of my mind. It helped that after crossing a few interesting squares on the way, my first stop of my day of wandering here was in the beautiful Patershol neighbourhood.
Bluenose Traveler 