Mt. McKay.
Sept, 2011.
Fishing with my younger brother and his girlfriend.
August 2011. Muskoka Lakes, Ontario.
Georgia Aquarium, August 2011.
“ I want to smile when I’m around spoiled college kids my age that talk about their guided trips to Europe with their parents, because they don’t understand the true sacrifice of a journey. ”
About a week before my departure from work, we had a new kid come in to replace me. He was 20 and your typical beer-and-pussy-loving frat bro with trademark phrase of “that’s gay”. I had the lucky responsibility of being the main one to train him, thus we got to spend a lot of lovely time together.
One day we got on the topic of travel and I told him of my trip to Vancouver last spring. Going there was a combination of car, train and bus, whereas my return was supposed to be a straight Greyhound across the country. Frat boy’s immediate question was “why would you do that to yourself?” He followed up with the notion that I must really love torturing myself.
However he failed to realize that it was one of my goals to see Canada by land and ultimately set foot in every province (all that remains is the north and the east). I really have no interest in holing myself up in some bubble that a resort provides and to not truly experience the culture of another country. His trip to Cuba last year entailed staying within the confines of the resort, getting drunk every day and banging him some hot chicks. I mean, the sex would be nice but dropping that much money on a trip to another country without the intent of experiencing the culture is absurd to me.
But it’s not even that. It’s the journey that matters. Spending five hours on a plane to the west coast seems too…easy. I did end up caving a booked a last minute out of Winnipeg, at about the halfway point of my Great Greyhound Journey, but had I flown in the first place, I would not have gotten to experience the grandeur of pulling into Jasper at the crack of down with the sun just peaking over the mountains and deer feeding on the dew covered grasses. I would not have been able to see the stars of the milky way as our bus crested over the mountains at some obscure hour of the night, nor watching dark storm clouds pass by in the distance over the Prairie horizon with no real idea of just how close or how far away they are. The tiny seat, the cramped butt, the lack of sleep; all of these were worth the experiences I had in this trip journey. The people that I had met, the stories we shared and created together- these would have never happened if I merely spend a couple hours on a plane with headphones and a movie playing in front of me.
Britannia Beach, Ottawa.
June 2011.
Camera get!
