Wine group on the road

March 30, 2025March 30, 2025 / Greg / 1 Comment

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.

Cocktails at the Chickadee Room in Vancouver

Juke Fried Chicken at the Chickadee Room

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Seattle two ways

March 9, 2025March 9, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

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.

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Looking back on 2024

January 9, 2025January 9, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

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.

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A love letter to Bathurst

December 3, 2024December 3, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

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.

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Then and now

November 16, 2024November 15, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

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.

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A quiet day in Ghent

November 6, 2024November 5, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

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.

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A gateway to Belgian beer

November 2, 2024November 2, 2024 / Greg / 1 Comment

While I liberally sampled many beers to kick off my European trip last year in Amsterdam, it was in Antwerp that the real beer tastings started. As a beer nerd, I had long wanted to do a deep dive sort of trip in Belgium to learn about and appreciate one of the best and richest beer culture countries. Antwerp was a literal and metaphorical gateway. Arriving there from Amsterdam on a Thursday afternoon there was only one thing on my mind… a visit to maybe the most unique beer bar I have experienced…. and visiting it wasn’t a guarantee.

Kulminator in the centre of Antwerp is a quirky place. I was met at an obscure door that doesn’t reveal what is inside by an older gentleman who asks what your purpose is. If he doesn’t like the look of you or you answer incorrectly, he’ll simply shut the door in your face. I arrived, and in my best French said I was from Canada and I wanted to (and this is *very* important) “taste” some exceptional beer. In this bar, you don’t drink beer, you “taste” it. The gentleman nodded and motioned for me to come inside and that started a beautiful, sensual beer tasting experience. I looked over a large binder of all of their cellared beers and made my selection. The gentleman’s wife poured me a gorgeous Rocherfort 8 from 2014. It tasted of chocolate, candied fruit, spice and everything nice. I was in heaven.

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Birds in train stations

October 23, 2024October 23, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

Maybe it is because I’m heading to a Hawksley Workman concert tonight and that his song “Birds in Train Stations” became a soundtrack for my wife and me during our recent visit to Italy. It seems a reasonable way to title this quick reflection of a trip that had us spending a bit of time navigating Italy’s notoriously not on schedule trains as we crossed from Milan to Turin to Asti and eventually on to small towns on the east coast of Lake Como. I mean, if you’ve ever traveled in Italy, take a listen to this song and grin at this line:

“birds in train stations
hear the same announcements everyday
except the ones in italy because there’s always some delay
and they move at a different pace”

Pretty much spot-on. At the end of the day, a national day-long train strike and a host of other trains that had a loose association with any concept of time became laughter and opportunity inducing more than anything (Strike? Let’s spend an unexpected night in Bellano!). Italy might be the only place on earth that can attempt to simultaneously frustrate you, then ask for forgiveness with offers of 5pm spritzes, plates of heavenly agnolotti in broth, stunning natural beauty, and impossibly amazing coffee in the most unlikely of places.

The two weeks were perfect. I cried at the beauty of a ballet at La Scala. My wife and I drank Barolo and Barbaresco that completely changed my view of what those wines can be. I lounged hours away looking out over the snow-capped Alps from the absurdly-sized deck of our Turin apartment. We wandered. We ate (oh my god, we ate). We were gifted homemade limoncello from a favourite restaurant in Milan that we used to toast good-night to each day along the way. I drove a tiny Fiat 500 with the roof down along twisty mountain roads. And maybe the best part of the entire trip…. was just being in the moment and letting all of the beauty around me wash over me for two weeks.

Thanks Italy. You were pretty great. Even with your annoying trains.

Wandering in Rotterdam

October 10, 2024October 3, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

I have a strong bias for planning deeply wired into my DNA. Over years of traveling, I have slowly learned to lean a touch opposite my natural inclination and just to let things be when it comes to experiencing places away from home. I still research an enormous list of possibilities of what I might like to do, but I think I have settled into a good place in terms of having some good ideas, then approaching each day with a “what feels good today” mentality.

In the Netherlands last fall, I knew I would like to do a few days trips from my home base in Amsterdam, and I knew that Rotterdam was a place I did not want to miss. I knew there would be an interesting mix of old and new, of art, and of food and drink and that was enough to propel me onto an early morning train with a bag slung over my shoulder. Exiting the main train station, a modern looking marvel, I kicked off a day of wandering that fairly naturally and organically led me to Oudehaven, the historical part of the harbour in Rotterdam. Not really due to my planning DNA, but I think this occurred due to the salt water craving that still clings to me after so many years living next to the harbour in Halifax.