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.
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.
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.
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.
Bluenose Traveler 