works of wanderlust

Category: travel tales

  • The Other End of the Rainbow

    Today is St. Patrick’s day here and I’m reminded that in 2019 I spent a weekend and a week in Dublin, Ireland.

    I break it up that way on purpose. A weekend and a week. The family and I were on a group trip with my daughter’s dance school through Scotland and Ireland. I went ahead of the group to Ireland a full weekend ahead of the rest of the group so that I could run a half marathon through Dublin. They showed up on Sunday evening and we spent another week touristing.

    I got out of the cab from my airport to the hotel and took this single photo.

    It was raining when I left Scotland and raining still when we landed at the Dublin airport.

    First impressions are often lasting.

    I’d been crammed into a RyanAir flight from Glasgow to Dublin, snagged the window so I could breath, and also breathe in the view of the lush green of the Irish countryside on our approach.

    I was travelling light. A change of clothes. Some personal kit. My running gear. A GoPro. My one small suitcase came off the luggage carousel (almost) first, and I quickstepped out into the taxi queue to find a ride to Chapelizod, a village suburb of Dublin where I’d booked my country-style hotel fit for my budget-conscious side-trip.

    My first time in Dublin. My first hour in Ireland.

    I paid the cabbie, stepped out into the small parking lot outside the hotel, and looked at the rain clouds drifting and clearing behind me to the east.

    A rainbow.

    I doubt I could have felt more of a stereotyped welcome to Ireland than a rainbow …unless perhaps a leprechaun had dashed across the street behind me.

    I snapped this selfie and sent it back to my family to let them know I’d arrived safely, checked in, and then likely went to find a pint of something.

  • Hiking: Just the Bear Necessities

    With so much closed and cancelled during the height of the pandemic, we took a couple short local vacations last summer to explore the nearby Rocky Mountain parks.

    We felt we needed another break so we’ve booked a couple more nights (in the near future) for a spring hotel getaway about five hundred meters from where I took this photo of a bear last summer.

    The thing about hiking in the mountains is that you’re probably going to see some wildlife.

    Maybe it will be just some birds flitting through the trees or a squirrel dashing across your path.

    Perhaps a larger animal of the cloven hoof variety will wander through the trees just far enough away to assert her caution into the scene.

    Or occasionally, a big old bear will be lumbering down the side of the road.

    I’ve come across bears a half dozen times on my wilderness adventures and every single time has resulted in a golden story that others want to hear. Bears, for whatever reason, are hiking adventure tale jackpots.

    I think it’s probably the blend of big critter who doesn’t have a care for what some pesky human is doing in the woods… unless of course he has all the care and could kill you if you get in his way.

    We’d been spotting bear advisory signage up and around the hotel and trails, but even so it was a bit of a shock to see this fella, a young black bear, ambling near the road leading into the trailhead parking lot one July weekend. We were preparing to hike from that same parking lot. I leaned cautiously out the car window and snapped a few photos with my iPhone, and we drove another three or four minutes down to park the car… a little rattled, a little awed.

    Luckily he was headed the other direction, and we enjoyed a couple hours in the mountain woods anyways.

    If all goes well, we’ll be hiking that same trail again inside of two weeks (and I’ll have some adventure journaling to share.) Chances are we’ll see some wildlife. Hopefully it’s still a little too early for another encounter with this guy.

  • What counts as a “visit” when traveling?

    I have a rule about traveling.

    Specifically, I have a rule about how I talk about traveling.

    When someone asks have you ever visited a place then my response is often… well… technically, that depends… sorta… kinda… here let me explain…

    A night shot of a European hotel.

    So, here. Let me explain.

    I’ve been poking through a lot of travel blogs lately. Thanks to the Twitter algorithm and the types of things I post I get recommended so many accounts that are hashtag-travel, and (I assume) vice versa, because that’s a good fraction of the folks who follow me first. Those blogs tend to fall into two categories:

    a) bloggers for money, who are (or who are trying to be) social media influencers, posting lots of gorgeous photos and extensive articles on very specific vacations, and

    b) bloggers for passion, who are (often) folks or couples in their 20s living their best life and writing about it while having this goal of “visiting 10 new countries every year” or “visiting 100 countries before I turn 30!”

    This second group tends to make me think about my own definition of what constitutes a visit.

    To clarify, an example: about five years ago the family and I spent 10 days travelling through Iceland, stopping at numerous small towns and moving on the next morning, eating, drinking, spending, taking lots of photos. Two years ago we had a layover at the airport in Iceland, ate some breakfast at the restaurant there, bought some snacks, and left a few hours later. In my mind, we’ve only visited Iceland once. I don’t count an airport layover as a visit.

    Another example: In 2006 or so we did a bus tour of Eastern Europe, one of those Contiki party trips where they shuttle you from city to city, hotel to hotel, bar to bar, and you take lots of pictures, drink yourself silly, and remember the blur twenty years later. Between a hotel in Budapest and a hotel in Krakow, the bus stopped for lunch in a small city in Slovakia. Can I tell people I’ve visited Slovakia? I had a delicious pizza lunch in an old town patio that I still don’t know how we successfully ordered from the waitress who spoke almost no English, but I honestly don’t claim that I’ve “visited” Slovakia. I don’t tend to count it on my list of visited countries.

    So this brings me back to my rule about how I talk about traveling.

    What counts as a visit for me?

    Personally, it’s a basic rule: an overnight, a meal, and time on feet in the street.

    If I count a place visited it means I’ve slept there, eaten, and wandered about. None of this “I drove through and stopped for coffee” or “I had a layover at the airport there once” stuff.

    What do you count as a visit?

  • One Last Trek

    During the summer of 2017 we travelled with friends just across the Alberta-British Columbia border to one of the highest peaks in Canada, Mount Robson and to climb the Berg Lake trail.

    Lucky those friends came along, because they remembered to bring something we forgot: strong tape.

    A pair of nearly-destroyed hiking boots wrapped in blue tape sit in a pile of hiking gear.

    Good boots are one of the most important pieces of hiking equipment you can own if you are a serious backpacker.

    Pictured are not my boots.

    They were the boots that belonged to my wife.

    And up until they crumbled on the trail they were good boots. They were, in fact, fantastic boots… when she bought them as a teenager nearly twenty years before that hike.

    They were even reasonably solid pieces of equipment for the first three days of our adventure, hiking all twenty-some kilometers up the mountain, and then accumulating another twenty or so klicks on the day-hiking trails near the campsite.

    The problem with old equipment though is that every day that you use it, more wear and tear accumulates, more seams are exposed to the elements, more aging glues and stitches weaken, and more chances loom for failure.

    Her boots failed just as we started our downward hike back towards home.

    At the top of the mountain, these boots looked like the good boots they had been for two decades. At the bottom of the mountain I took this photo and then we dropped them in a nearby trash bin.

    Every couple of kilometers we would stop and I would sit at my wife’s feet wrapping them as tightly and securely as I could with a borrowed roll of tape. The glue under between the tread and toe had failed and like an ill-timed puppet show, began flapping open like a mouth at with each and every step.

    The takeaway lesson of these fall-apart boots was not that equipment fails, but rather that you never know when equipment might fail, and being properly prepared means expecting failure and setting yourself up to avoid or mitigate the negative results of that failure…

    …like carrying tape, or not hiking in twenty-year old boots that might fall apart.

  • Iceland: Rotten Like a Shark

    It’s Travel Tuesday and digging through my collection of interesting travel pictures I’m reminded of a half-dozen years ago when we went on a ten day family vacation in Iceland.

    My goals for that trip were:

    Find lots of epic scenery.

    Take lots of amazing photos.

    Eat lots of interesting foods.

    Sampling fermented shark.

    Hákarl is an Icelandic delicacy. Go Google Icelandic fermented shark and you’ll find all sorts of history of this curious dish dating back centuries and linked to the survival of ancient peoples in a harsh and unforgiving land.

    From what I recall, Greenland Sharks whose flesh is mostly unpalatable and composed of high quantities of toxic ammonia were buried on the beach and left to rot. When they instead fermented (and the dogs didn’t die from eating the remains that were dug up) they became a food source, and eventually a deliberately crafted one.

    Today, Icelanders largely only consume it on special occasions, in particular at a mid-winter festival in small bites and chased by a shot of the local vodka-like drink Brennivín.

    We went to one of the spots in the northern part of Iceland where on a small, remote farm the man in the navy blue shirt ran the Iceland Shark Museum (check the link, he’s on the homepage as of me posting this!) where he shared the history of the industry to create Hákarl. He also produces a lot of the volume of the dish.

    Most visitors show up to visit the museum and (from what I understand) pay their Euros to enter the museum. This small fee also includes a small cube, roughly half a centimeter to a side, of some mild, tourist-friendly Hákarl on a toothpick and a thimble-full of Brennivín.

    The day we went I pulled out my camera and started snapping pictures even as we stepped out of the car. And though I don’t speak Icelandic from what I could tell the man in the red jacket was (best guess) a commercial buyer who had come to investigate some serious samples. The man in the navy blue shirt was slicing off fresh slabs of fermented shark with that knife in his hand and they were tasting it, and me and my camera-nosy-self was snapping happily away.

    I looked up and man in the navy blue shirt had extended the tip of his knife towards me and laying across the tip was a sliver of fermented shark roughly the size of my pinkie finger.

    Again, I don’t speak the language and I was a total tourist… yet I had intentionally come here for an experience exactly like this.

    So… I hung my camera loose around my neck, thanked him, and popped the slab of freshly sliced fermented shark flesh into my mouth.

    Delicacies are such for the precise reason that they are best consumed wrapped in story, steeped in tradition, and savoured in small quantities. To me in that moment, the consistency and taste of what I had just eaten was something that I could only articulate by comparing it to what I imagined it might taste like were I to scoop a bit of congealed bathroom cleaner from the bottom of a particularly old bottle and slip in across my tongue.

    Six years later I still have that one moment firmly planted in my mind across ten very full days in Iceland.

    And I didn’t even get my chaser of Brennivín until half an hour later at the end of the museum tour and a (much milder) cube of Hákarl.