The Travel Bug (and how the corona virus killed it)
FLASHBACK 2019: I’m in a place I love and I’m alone - deliciously alone. No-one can reach me. I can’t reach anyone. All I’ve got is the screen ahead of me and food and wine on my tray. This week, I will visit my 30th country. The roundness of this number is satisfying.
I idly scroll through Hollywood releases. Good: “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” It’s only when I’m flying that I catch up on films. I select it and think back to my first trip on a jet at about the time this movie is set. My parents each came to Canada from England in 1949, met, and married shortly after. Other than dad making a trip back in 1973 to see his dying sister, they had not returned. The next year, they took three of us kids to meet relatives. Flying was an event then. BOAC made me a proud member of the Junior Jet Club, issued me a logbook, and let me join the captain briefly in the cockpit. I was a seasoned flyer already, my dad a private pilot with a half-built airplane in our cellar, but seeing all those instruments blew my seven year old mind. I think I threw the logbook out but I wonder if I still have my travel scrapbook? Must check when I get back to Toronto.
With my eyes on the movie but my thoughts wondering, I flash forward a few years to two return trips to England with my parents. Wardair, Canada’s failed luxury airliner, served me my first filet mignon. Hard to imagine today as I look at my tray. I pause Tarantino to sample the chicken which tastes and looks like sawdust. The wine is drinkable, thankfully.
In my 20s, travel took a holiday for financial reasons, but as soon as I was a bit established, I started traveling alone. First, a week in London where I walked and walked and walked from my Chelsea hotel, visiting museums, going to concerts, and drinking in the culture and the beer. I’m not going to London on this trip but if I were, I’d hit The King’s Road, and pick up a pair of shoes, a tradition I started on that trip nearly 30 years ago. It’s not fun to shop when you can’t find things to fit but shoes are pretty standard the world round. That first pair was fantastic - black leather with 2 inch high square heel and straps with buttons. If I hadn’t worn them to death, I’d wear them still today except they wouldn’t accommodate orthotics. A couple of years after London, I strode up and down the hills of San Francisco and around the houseboats of Sausalito wearing those London shoes.
My first trans-Pacific flight was a couple of years later when I spent a month in New Zealand. No private inflight screening of Brad Pitt films then. We all watched the same screen, hanging from the ceiling a few rows ahead. If the choice didn’t suit me, I’d read a book, write in my journal, or listen to CDs. Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” accompanied me as we deplaned in Honolulu where we were corralled in a paddock with walls open to the outside. The seductive smell of tropical flowers and the thick late evening humidity wafted in. I will return here for a visit one day, was all I could think as I so often did about places I hadn’t explored yet.
In NZ, I split my time between touring around on the train, visiting Canadian friends studying there, and meeting relatives who’d emigrated from England. We spent my friend’s birthday on White Island off the coast of the north island where we walked around the mouth of a semi-active volcano, smelling the acrid sulphur from the bubbling below us. That day-trip was surely the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, but at 30, and not yet a lawyer, I naively assumed it would be safe or they wouldn’t be offering tours. I never imagined 23 years later it would explode, killing many tourists having the same experience I’d had.
As with so many of my trips, today’s flight to Portugal is a solo one. But in the late 90s, I worked for an international environmental NGO. We didn’t reflect too much on the irony of burning greenhouse gases while traveling to discuss reducing them. The best trip, hands-down, was back to NZ where my work friends enjoyed its laid-backness just as much as I did. The most foreign experience was our trip to Shenyang, China and Seoul. In China, we were part of an international delegation and ushered around the small (just three million) city northwest of Beijing in motorcades, a very surreal and unwelcome window into the world of celebrity. On Korean Air, I fell in love with Korean food and eating with metal chopsticks. Best airplane food I’d had since Wardair. I look down at my tray. I loathe eating with plastic.
I think ahead to my landing in a couple of hours. Greg will meet me at the Faro airport. I’ve never been to the Algarve before although I have been to Portugal so I can’t add it to the country tally. Greg’s a friend since grade 9 and not long after we both left Wingham, he started moving around the world, giving me chances to visit him at his place or to meet in destinations we both wanted to see. We laugh about the number of airports we’ve met in, the first being Paris in the early 90s. We rented an Alpha Romeo and drove around Normandy and Brittany, experiencing our first calvados and langoustines, among other delights. Since then, we’ve met in airports in Sydney, Seattle, Vancouver, London, Brussels, and Rome. And Pearson of course. Many, many times I’ve met him there; I live just 15 minutes away from Canada’s largest airport, handy for all the travel I plan for my widowhood.
As well as getting a little November sun and joining Greg on a work trip to Monaco, this trip is a distraction from the first anniversary of Jack’s death, just three days away. It’s fitting I’m marking this occasion with a trip to Europe. Meeting Jack opened up a whole new kind of European travel that always ended or began in Poland, his home country. We went five times in our nine years together. The stated purpose of the travel was to see his mother, his sons, and other relatives. But the fun was the adventures along the way — road trips from Wroclaw (his city) to Warsaw and Krakow; finding old castles along the byways to clamber over; marvelling at what I dubbed the Polish Forest Hookers (sex workers who stand in the woods along highways for the convenience of the passing truckers). And then there were stopovers in other countries - England, Ireland, Iceland, Scandinavia - and a family wedding in Portugal. With Jack, there was always excitement like nearly missing flights or getting lost, and rushing through airports to get to the smoking area. I pushed for us to travel in Canada too because it’s a great sadness to me that immigrants never have the luxury of exploring their adopted country. We drove to Charlottetown and took three trips west including our final trip together on the Rocky Mountaineer from Banff to Vancouver. No Canadian should die without seeing the Rockies.
As we begin the descent into Faro, I think about the trip I took just shy of a year ago, three weeks after Jack died. I flew to see Greg in London. The wound was so fresh then, travel provided much needed salve for it. That wound, much improved in recent months, has felt tender again and I know the balmy breezes of the Mediterranean will soothe and the adventure to Monaco that follows will distract me from the ache.
I cannot know as I collect my bag from the carousel, that four months later, COVID will plant me firmly in my corner of Toronto and that it will be nearly 2 years before I will consider driving more than two hours from home. By then, friends will be itchy to travel again - indeed some will have already. But I will have no interest in flying. Some of this will be due to greater environmental awareness as we’ll witness the horrors of fires and floods in Western Canada at the same time as we hunker down. Some of this will result from Greg’s COVID inspired return to Toronto after nearly 30 years away. Some of this will relate to the political and military unrest in Eastern Europe. Some of this will be ongoing fear of COVID.
But mostly I will feel like I’ve travelled enough, the corona virus having seemingly exterminated the travel bug that has infected me for decades.
But right now I blithely cross the arrivals floor to meet Greg who greets me with a latte and a grin. “Hey, Cel,” he says. We’re met by the late morning sun as we walk to his car, chattering away like school kids.
