While my hopes might have been higher for more travel in 2021, I finally made it back out east to visit family I hadn’t seen in close to two years. That three week summer trip, the first time in my career I have ever taken three consecutive weeks off, was a revelation. Part reunion tour with lots of hugs and stories to share with family and part vacation with a suddenly fresh set of eyes for places that now feel less like home after so long living, and hunkering down in Saskatoon.

Most of my favourite travel memories this past year are from that three week trip back to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but I will be liberal with the term “travel” as a few of my favourite memories in 2021 were about other forms of escape or diversion during the third and fourth waves of a pandemic that hit Saskatchewan very hard. So here they are in no particular order, my favourite travel memories and moments of 2021.

(1) Beers with Dad – It had been far too long since Dad and I had just had a good hang at my favourite craft brewery in Bathurst. On a steaming hot August day, we enjoyed a couple of our favourite beers (mine, Four Rivers Brewery’s amazing Havre St. Pierre, a medal winning amber ale that I wish I could have a stash of back home in Saskatoon) and chatted an afternoon away.

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