works of wanderlust

Category: travel & vacations

  • did I mention vancouver?

    It has actually been a couple months since we took a spring trip out to the west coast and spent a five day long weekend in Vancouver. It wasn’t so much that I forgot to write about it, only that I wasn’t blogging much back even two months ago (having not yet rebooted this site) and tho I had posted a few pics elsewhere, none have made their way here.

    It was mere hours away from a monumental spring snowfall back home when we lifted out of the airport on a short flight to the coast. We would watch the city-stalling blizzard through our doorbell camera while sitting in the hotel later that evening, but like old times when we lived out here, whatever the hell was going on back in Alberta was out of sight and out of mind.

    There are a million great reasons to visit Vancouver. The climate. The ocean. The food. The bustle of the city. Us? We were avoiding California. No, really. We had a trip down to Los Angeles planned for spring break and cancelled it in the wake of political uncertainty down south and the elbows up vibe around US travel. Everything was refundable except the flight credits which we spun around into a flight to Vancouver instead.

    We visited old haunts from our days living out there.

    We ate some amazing food, inexpensive and wonderful sushi, burned our faces off with hot pot, and gobbled a whole pizza on robson.

    We took a trip out to the university campus. The Kid was still considering schooling there at the time and we had a friend who gave us a little tour.

    We took in an improv show on Granville Island.

    We scored tickets to the Juno awards.

    On our Sunday morning there I woke up and did something I had never done, even in the three years living out on the coast: I ran the ten klick loop around the Stanley Park seawall. Heck, I wasn’t much of a runner back then, but I had always regretted missing out on that little adventure.

    Pangs of regret filled the weekend. We like our life back here on the praries, filled with adventure and friends and affordable housing, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had stuck it out. Twenty-one years after bailing on Vancouver we might have made it work somehow. Owned a house, maybe? A condo, at least. Spent our days immersed in a place like that which is so much more nuanced than the suburbs of this sprawling prairie city where we are now. Life would have been something else entirely. Who can really say, but I walked through familiar streets and pondered it nonetheless.

    Noting that going back to New York or Chicago is off the table for us for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t help but feel one morning, sitting in a cafe in downtown that it wasn’t that I was missing those particular cities as much as I was missing the feel of urban life. I am a guy who is comfortable in the wilderness, unreachable and alone, but I also am a bit of a city dude, soaking in the crowds and the crunch and architecture of tall building pressing in around me. Vancouver would have fit both those bills, and I spent a few hours over that weekend wondering if I missed Vancouver because that’s who I am or if Vancouver caught me at some formative moment in my life and what I’m really yearning for is my long lost twenties. Maybe a bit of both.

    There was nothing to complain about on the trip. The flights were on time. The food was cheap. The sights were accomodating. The celebrities were spotted. The rain was gone before it could be anything more than a reminder that Vancouver is less a tropical paradise than a city at the edge of a northern rainforest.

    We need to go back more often, I realize. It may not be our next trip, but I can already see another one soon.

  • Travel Memories in 1000 Pieces

    Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas.

    Gifting jigsaw puzzles can be tricky.  They vary in difficulty. Not everyone is into spending hours fiddling with a game like that. And then the vast variety of images depicted in their giant tabletop chaos can evoke a feeling that is often a matter of taste, particularly for larger sets that sit there taunting you to build them for weeks and weeks.

    Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and hit the nail directly, squarely on the head.

    See, back in November we spent five days in New York City. Specifically, we spent five days wandering around mostly near midtown Manhattan and Times Square.  We did a lot of fun stuff, but my own personal recollections of the time there were punctuated by three specific memories: Broadway, sketching, and people everywhere.

    Someone gave us a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and it depicts a bustling scene of Time Square rendered as a colourful urban sketch of a hundred memories of our recent New York vacation.

    Tall colourful buildings.

    Taxicabs and street vendors.

    People and signs and shapes and shadows.

    Lines and hatches and curves and squiggles.

    A thousand pieces of a travel memory perfectly encapsulated in a jigsaw puzzle project.

    …though it didn’t take us too long at all to get it assembled.

  • Camping My Style

    December 5 of 31 December-ish posts

    I’m no stranger to crazy sleeping conditions when away from home. I’ve travelled far and wide and slept in a thousand different beds, from plush king-size mattresses to wooden bunks in unheated cabins to sleeping bags on the ground with a snow-covered tent just inches from my face.

    But somehow 2022 was something of a hotel year.

    What do you wish you’d done
    less of this past year?

    Multiple trips to the mountains and at least a few weeks abroad in 2022 and, if I’m being completely honest, I only spent a single night in a tent.

    I mean, sure, they frown on you pitching your own accommodations on the lawns around Disney World, and while I probably could have gotten away with it in New York’s Central Park, I was travelling light and a sleeping bag would have cluttered my carry on.

    I joke, but seriously though, I get to the end of 2022 looking back on my travels and outdoor adventures and by random happenstance they all kind of started and ended in reasonably nice hotels. 

    We stayed in a pirate themed room in Florida.

    My various trips to the mountains included a ski lodge condo, an Airbnb basement suite, renting an entire house with my running friends, and an apartment suite near to the highland games grounds where my daughter was competing that particular weekend.

    We booked an anniversary getaway to a nordic spa and I wasn’t going to convince my wife that tenting was a great accompaniment to that adventure.

    And in New York last month we were on the 33rd floor of a mid-town hotel overlooking the Hudson river with glimpses of Times Square.

    Hotels abounded.

    And while we were spoiled for every last one of those trips, I’ve been looking back over two-aught-twenty-two and kinda wish I’d had a few less of those kinds of adventures, and few more in one of our tents.

    We have three tents.

    Our oldest by far is an early-2000s model backpacking tent. It’s reasonably light, sleeps two, and served us well on numerous hiking trips.

    The big tent is our car camping tent, a hefty six person beast that has a full vestibule (into which I could fit either of my other two tents assembled) and it’s what we bought so we could camp as a family with a dog in her kennel everyone on an inflatable bed and yet still keep all the luggage organised.

    The newest tent is the three person ultra-compact tent that we bought as a replacement for our first ageing backpacking tent. It’s so lightweight  it practically carries itself up the mountain, and we’ve set it up only four times in as many years, mostly thanks to those particular hiking trails being closed due to the pandemic.

    It’s a good thing I cleaned and packed them all so well in 2021 because they didn’t really see much action this year.

    Now, I don’t purport this blog to be a camping blog, per se, but there is a certain expectation from even just me that the term “outdoor adventure” comes with a certain frequency of sleeping outdoors. I subscribe to enough other content creators to know that some of those folks are sleeping outdoors on the weekly, and even the local guys I watch truck it out to the coast for the harshest part of winter to keep up their stats.

    I checked into hotels a lot this year. And I kinda dropped the ball on the tenting. And I’m actually a little bit sad about that.

  • Travel: New York in November

    It’s been nearly a year since we left the country last, but after six months of plotting and planning our long awaited return to Manhattan finally rolled into view on the calendar.

    Whatever else, it might give me some things to write about here over the coming week or two as I settle back into that post-vacation it’s-snowy-at-home winter blues, but for now I thought it useful enough to kill some time on a six hour airport layover writing that it happened at all.

    The trip itself, like so much we seem to do these days, was a make up trip from one that was supposed to have happened during the pandemic. The Kid was paid and ready for a school-run adventure to the Big Apple with her eighth grade classmates back in 2020, a trip that never happened, and one that was rewarded as something of a honours-in-middle-school do-over that came due this past weekend.

    The Kid, being a theatre kid, was primed for some Broadway brilliance, so no less than three of our evening and a substantial portion of my October paycheque, bought us a trio of a trio of tickets for The Music Man, Beetlejuice the Musical, and Book of Morman.

    That was her jam.

    My jam was taking a ton of photos, eating pizza and sitting in Central Park on a rock and sketching.

    I’ll have more to write about the trip soon, as soon as the trip settles in my writing mind, but for now it’s probably good enough to say that it was an excellent mini-vacation, I’m tired as heck, and I still got most of a continent to traverse before bedtime.

  • Hiking: Mountain Bunkers

    Back in March of this year, 2022, we made yet another long weekend into a family adventure getaway to the mountains. With few plans besides a booked hotel suite and our hiking gear, we landed in the town of Canmore after a four hour spring drive.

    A year earlier we had zipped off to the same general area (but a different side of the mountain and a different set of plans) and had done some fun, easy hikes but then had a crazy winter drive back home at the end of it all.

    While the forecast turned out to be more cooperative this trip, we were a lot less prepared for what to do with our relatively pleasant weather. So when I suggested a short hike to try and find the mysterious nuclear fallout bunker on the side of a nearby mountain, there were few objections.

    If you stand at the mouth of the Heart Creek Bunker and look North (and down) you can easily see the Trans-Canada Highway snaking by in the valley below, rounding the corner of Lac des Arcs and disappearing around the far end of the same mountain upon which you are standing.

    The bunker is not difficult to find, though the route is not clearly marked as to what you will see when you embark on the short two kilometer trail part way up the side of a cliff face.

    In fact, if it wasn’t for various social media and independent hiking guide sites I doubt many people beside the locals who live in nearby Canmore would know about this odd little gem.

    As the story goes, the bunker was started (but never finished) in the late 1960s as “part of a Cold War-era plan to keep important government records safe in the event of a disaster, up to and including a nuclear bomb.”

    But it leaked, water dripping through the porous rock, and then too political tides changed and I’m sure the whole endeavor became financially unfeasible so… now there is a cave dug out a couple hundred meters into the side of a mountain, and a narrow, unmarked trail through the forest leading to its entrance.

    There were three other hiking parties there when we arrived in the mid-morning, and also about a half dozen other dogs. We chatted and let the dogs play and took each other’s photos at the mouth of the cave.

    Then we went in.

    It was pitch black inside save for the lights we carried with us.

    I took as many pictures as I could in the dim light and recorded some video:

    The walls were marked with graffiti and messages from past visitors as the site is apparently popular with locals for parties and late night fun and light painting and boondocking.

    The dog was spooked by the whole experience and she needed to be carried out after less than ten minutes in the pitch black and eerily quiet cave.

    And then … we turned our back and returned down the mountain path to our car. On the ride home, spotty mountain internet service stretched to the limit, my wife who is usually a planning and research guru for our travels took the chance to finally look up the weird history of the strange mountain bunker we’d just visited. Even our server at dinner later that evening perked his ears and seemed curious that a trio of tourists had made their way up to the secret Canmore bunker.

    Off-the-beaten path sights are not necessarily rare, but they are always weird and magical and mysterious when you find them… especially if you didn’t even plan on looking in the first place.