works of wanderlust

Tag: pandemic fallout

  • Merry Christmas

    What did you want this year
    … and get?

    Too much.

    As I was wrapping up my work email for the holiday break yesterday, thumbing through my last few messages, a long thank you note rolled in from the president of a company with which my team does a significant amount of business.

    It concluded with a bit of an explanation:

    “We had thought about sending out our usual gift baskets this year,” he wrote, “ but with the logistics of everyone working from home we decided not to do that.”

    ”Instead,” he continued, “we have made a large donation to the food bank in the names of all our clients.”

    I remember in past years when over the last week before the Christmas break a few big boxes of chocolates or candies would appear and everyone would pick away at them as the last few days wound down to vacation. As much as I know the work I do is appreciated by some, the mundane and behind-the-scenes nature of being a technology professional means a lot of it also goes unnoticed. It’s nice to be appreciated, and a bix box of treats definitely helps.

    It’s a weird thing to miss, but then again there a lot of things missing these days, huh?

    I hit the reply button and typed something back, thanking him and wishing him a Merry Christmas.

    We miss the sweets, but most of us are doing the kind of work we do to make the world a more interesting place, not for the Christmas baskets.

    I got too much of the things I thought I wanted this past year, but seeing a simple little gesture like that, as basic and seemling obvious as it is reminded me that what I really wanted this year was for the world to be a little gentler, more caring, and generous to each other.

    So, I guess I got a little of that, at least.

  • Interesting Places

    Depending on how the rest of my holiday-countdown week shapes up, how the holiday break happens (or not), and a couple of pandemic-related decisions that have yet to be made get sorted, going out on the winter trails last night for a six klick run in the falling snow may have marked my last run with the crew of this year.

    Describe your 2021 in terms of fitness, health, mind and body.

    In fact just about a week ago a new bridge opened up crossing the mighty North Saskatchewan river.

    About five years ago the old and well-loved foot bridge at the same location was closed (amidst protest) as construction of a new leg of our rapid rail transit system was officially started. The Tawatinâ Bridge which opened last week now stands in its place and is an LRT rail bridge with a wide pedestrian foot bridge suspended below it. The view from that footbridge is of the city, the river, and a huge collection of indigenous art embedded into the concrete.

    We parked near that bridge last night even as the snow started to fall and then we ran a loop through the river valley trails near downtown, a run that concluded with crossing the bridge (on foot) for the first time.

    It was dark, snowy, and the bridge was spectacularly lit and illuminated brilliantly even by the frozen precipitation all around and in the air.

    If it was my last crew run of 2021, it was a fitting one.

    We call it another year of lockdowns and uncertainty, but to be sure for much of the world it marks the first full calendar year, January through December, of what is turned out to be the embodiment of that famous curse “may you live in interesting times.”

    Who knew interesting times would be so repetitive and boring.

    Admittedly in the last two years I’ve lost a measurable amount of my fitness.

    I entered 2020 with the plan of training for and running the Chicago marathon, while two years later (not having ever stepped a single foot in Chicago after all) I plod out ten klick runs on the regular, but can’t barely conceive of training for a full marathon distance lately.

    Running has kept me healthy though… mentally, physically and soulfully.

    That likely has as much to do with a core group of six or seven people as anything involving sneakers or trails.

    That said, a run like the one we did last night would have been an unusual adventure two years ago. Meeting somewhere other than the running store. Meeting at a time off the regular schedule. Running a course that was as much exploration and discovery as it was an exercise in fitness and training.

    The pandemic, in blocking off the regular pattern of things, has disrupted so much in negative ways, but in adapting to those disruptions it has created interesting changes.

    May you run in interesting places isn’t so much a curse as it is a cure for the mind and body.

    And we certainly spent 2021 running through interesting places.

  • Travel Advisory

    It seems almost ironic that the day I set aside to sum up my year in travel, the government of my country leaked that they’ve decided to reinstitute yet another travel advisory sometime in the next day or so.

    Here we go again.

    Or, really, here we don’t go anywhere.

    What is travel anyhow? Getting away from your house? Your city? Your country?

    Did you travel in 2021?

    I’ve been fortunate enough that despite multiple ebbs and flows of restrictions and limitations we’ve made our way around our beautiful province this past year.

    In particular, a couple week-long trips to the mountains this past summer broke up the monotony of working from home and the never ending bad news cycle.

    We packed up and spent a week exploring the world famous sights around Banff, hiking through day trips up mountains and through canyons and into cute little restaurants for elaborate lunches.

    We spent another week in the mountain town of Jasper later in the summer, doing more hiking, meeting old friends for wild runs, and dabbling in the icy waters afloat in our new inflatable kayak.

    For the last couple decades we’ve been fortunate enough to be travellers of a more worldly sort. The year before the pandemic we spent nearly three weeks between Scotland and Ireland. We tripped through some of America’s interesting cities like New York, Los Angeles, Maui, Las Vegas and Orlando. For a couple years we got into cruising and snorkeling off the back of a boat and from exotic island beaches. One summer we even donned our winter clothes and spent ten days touring Iceland. It has been a life spent on experience rather than things.

    The past couple years have been tough and we tried to make up as best we could with local adventures, and made those adventures as satisfying as possible given the realities of a locked down world.

    Tomorrow the news is either going to be bad or really bad. Either we’re spending the holidays worried, or we’re spending them locked down at home once again. It’s the right thing, I know. I believe. But it doesn’t make the yearning for distant adventures any easier to bear.

  • Pandemic Puppies

    At least half the dogs in our neighbourhood these days are less than a year and a half old.

    The pandemic puppy phenomenon did not pass us by around here, and every day as we go for our walks in the rain, shine, epic heat or brutal cold, we encounter so many other of these pandemic pups in the park.

    Pups who have neither care nor concern that the very pandemic that forged virtually every aspect of their lives to date still has a lingering subtle effect on their human companion’s day-to-day.

    Some day, maybe even soon, things will go back to normal… ish.

    But maybe not quite yet.

  • Travel: Disney in the Time of COVID

    My wife has been waking up at three thirty in the morning lately. Deliberately. Her alarm goes off, she activates her phone, logs into the Disneyworld website, and queues up her virtual reservation system trying to get us a dinner seating at a reasonable time and place … for some time next year.

    I’m not a planner.

    For example, when a couple years back I ditched the official tour group, our dance studio travelling companions, for a couple days to head off in advance to Ireland leaving them behind in Scotland, I arrived in Dublin, checked into my hotel and then, simply, went for a walk.

    No real destination planned. No expectations. No reservations. Not even a proper bus ticket to get me back to the start. Just me and my feet, wandering.

    I plan vacations, of course. But more often than not when I get there I like to explore, take things as they come, and see what the trip presents me.

    It’s great.

    But here’s the thing …

    We’re planning a trip to Florida for the new year.

    We’re even crossing an international border, no less.

    And I assumed the planning part, including booking flights, hotels, and a car rental was complete. (In fact I assumed it was complete almost two years ago when we booked it the first time but then it got cancelled and we had all these travel credits and … deep breath!)

    I was wrong. In 2022 a trip to the magical magic kingdom is rife with a less-than-cavalier planning problem. You can’t just show up. You can’t “wing it.” You can’t arrive without a charged phone with the Disney app, nor lacking a catalog of ride times, neither walking in out of the parking lot hoping for anything but a day of disappointment and disaster … which brings me back to three-thirty this morning, when my wife’s alarm went off.

    See, between crowd limits and general popularity, it seems as though Disneyworld has its own planning problem: tens of thousands of people arrive each and every day into their parks and all those people want to enter, play, ride, shop, eat, and exit to go back to their hotels. Rinse. Repeat.

    In order to get a meal that isn’t served at a kiosk from a paper plate, we need a reservation, and reservations open so many days in advance at six in the morning Florida time, fill up in literal minutes, and we’re not on Florida time. So, if she waits until the morning … hello quick serve pizza slices for supper.

    See, guys like me throw off the flow.

    Disney can’t just have everyone … or really anyone … showing up and wandering, no plans, no structure, lacking expectations or reservations.

    In fact, those literal reservations need to be made months in advance, setting up plans about which rides you plan to be riding on which days and which meals you intend to eat at what time and when and where … and perhaps even why…

    All that spontaneous family fun, it turns out, needs to be carefully orchestrated months before the suitcases come out of storage. I already know what days and times we’ll be standing in line for that Star Wars ride or It’s a Small World, or just Starbucks to keep my eyes open with a venti coffee to help keep me alert as I reach the point of exhaustion from the meticulously planned vacation.

    Partly I blame COVID. The need to organize people flow around health rules has exacerbated the drive towards app-driven, technology-backed, ultra-planned everything.

    Partly it is also a symptom of going somewhere nearly universally popular.

    And partly, I take the blame as someone who doesn’t thrive in this type of vacation … and taking one for the “team” so that the family can have a long-planned trip.

    Next time, though, I’m just going to leave my phone at home and go get lost in the woods.