works of wanderlust

Tag: vacations

  • head over feets, four

    One of the hardest parts about trying to keep a fitness routine is that life often takes priority over sweat. Late July and early August have been excellent examples of how a blur of family and community obligations can quickly derail any training plan. Couple that to a mid-summer heat wave where the temperatures have frequently swelled to a sweltering 30C on the daily, and finding the time and motivation to be out on the trails has been a bigger challenge than doing the work itself. 

    To elaborate, since I last posted a fairly productive span of workouts: 

    Literally a day and a half later I was back in the pool with good intentions to repeat my thousand meter swim from Sunday evening. Recovery was not on my side, however, and I did half that much and was happy enough that I could muster five hundred. Those arms were still pretty sore.

    And while we don’t usually run often on Tuesday evenings, we threw off our schedule to do a run + drinks for an impromptu birthday party. After about five klicks around the neighbourhood from the parking lot of a local lounge restaurant we resumed to a pint and recovered the calories we had burnt. 

    Stuff happened here. Namely, we went on a bit of vacation to the interior of BC for six days. In that span I either sat in a car for literal day-long drives through the mountains with little more activity than occasionally getting out to stretch our legs—or doing crazy active stuff like paddling around a lake in a kayak for hours upon hours. I did not run. I did not swim. I did not follow any routine. It was glorious.

    But shortly we were back home and—in the middle of a heat wave—I resumed my swimming the next morning and even spent an hour on a stationary bike that evening.

    Yet summer fun intervened again and as the August long weekend rolled around my fitness schedule was a blur of social activity and volunteering. I did squeeze in a five klick breakfast run with the crew on Monday, but the bulk of my activity was actually being on my feet standing at a stove in the middle of a park cooking crepes for the heritage festival followed by five hours of hard labour packing up a temporary kitchen in the lingering summer heat.

    Life should settle out for a few weeks now, and even though a few of the crew are in their last couple of weeks training before the local marathon weekend I should be able to get back on a regular schedule with my own plans.

  • 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.