Seriously?! Have I Forgotten How to Fly?!

I guess you were all wondering what happened to me! To much sightseeing and pasta in Roman heat, I'm exhausted and keep falling asleep! I am writing this eating pasta in front of the Pantheon.... 

I promised you a story of my near miss flights.... 

I should start my story a couple days earlier as my journey actually began when I moved upstairs....but only from the apartment I was in, where I had slept and belonged and gotten awfully comfortable for 109 days.

So I packed my bags and moved up a flight of stairs for three nights. I don't know if I mentioned my new life skills of teacher, cook and painter (not the arty kind) but I had painted (over the above lines I'd marked on the wall....joking) in the apartment downstairs and it was too smelly to sleep there!

My new penthouse view. 

Three days later, on the 5th of July, I hopped in a car, was smuggled across the border and found myself standing in a nearly empty parking lot at the Birmingham Airport.

Only one entrance (the furthest away of course) and mask on, hands sanitized and I look up to a disconcertingly deserted airport. 

I checked in with a very nice half Canadian and half British guy, we had a nice chat and he kindly pretended my bag wasn't 4 kilos overweight, how the #@£& did that happen! I left half my stuff in Wales!

Through security with the people from the one other scheduled flight happening around the same time to a dark, empty concourse with only a WH Smith open.

As I sat in dark deserted no man's land eating my sandwich and watching the empty departures board for my gate. There were only two flights, how hard can this be? It says gate announcement in 5 min.....for much longer than that.....actually long enough for me to hear the dreaded 'last call for Eurowings flight to Düsseldorf' 

I had to run for it, along with about 20 other people. I guess its been so long since they've had to work they have forgotten how that departures board thing is supposed to work.

Onboard services are very limited for those of you who are wondering. Masks mandatory onboard unless eating or drinking and then masks back on.

And I'm off.....weeeeeeeeee......so excited, huge grin hidden under my mask until we hit a huge pocket of turbulence and then the mask conveniently hides my swearing as I'm reminded of why I hate flying.

I arrive in Düsseldorf only to find those handy no contact machines for checking my EU passport closed and everyone funneled through to a live border guard, which I find odd with all the talk about everything going contactless but OK.

With no temperature checks, no Covid questions, she had me stand there forever whilst she inspects my passport.

Then asks me ridiculous questions like, where was I born and when was I born...maybe her handy dandy passport scanning machine was broken or she doesn't actually know how to read.

I'm in! Waiting two hours for my connecting flight, when all of a sudden I hear the familiar cry of 'last call for Eurowings flight to Prague'.....what the everloving....it hasn't been that long! Am I seriously this out of practice?! My phone didn't update the time so I had six minutes to get to my flight, good thing I was just around the corner.

Ooopsy Daisy. Flights are still pretty limited, hence the no direct flight to Prague and then the question of what I would have done stuck in Düsseldorf. 

My arrival in Prague is without fan fare, its quiet but normal airport day quiet. I go to hand my passport over, he sees its Czech and waves me thru. No questions, no temperature checks and all of a sudden I find myself masked up in the back of an Uber. Home in my favourite city.

Luggage or baggage?!

As many of you know I spend most of my life packing (or unpacking and repacking), something, to go somewhere and I really don't like packing, I like it about as much as I like flying.  I know, I know, why do I do what I do if I dislike two of the fundamentals of travel?!
Because it is worth it, I love arriving places, I love seeing the faces and hugging all of the people I love around the world.

I love the familiarity of the moving even if it is somewhere I have never been. One of the hardest things this year has been not seeing my 'moving family', despite constantly being on the move with my life and my job, there is a continuity through the people I have come to think of as friends and family.  Friends from long ago, actual related family, local guides, coach drivers, hotel staff, the people who work onboard the ships and colleagues, they are what makes being on the road all the time so worth it.  And if I haven't already mentioned it, ha ha, I miss them.  A lot.

I'm puttering around my place in Prague trying to pack for my departure to Italy tomorrow, with only a 30 litre back pack 😱 and wondering how am I going to fit my yoga mat in there.....

For those of you out there who have ever had to lift my suitcases (I'm thinking of the bellman who ask me if I've packed my skis, a bowling ball and a few souvenir rocks from the Danube), you can imagine how hard it is for me to pack this light.  

As a result I am procrastinating and writing this instead!

I was going to write about airports and flying and what it is like right now but it looks like I decided to work on the subject of baggage instead ;-)

What do I need.  A question I'm asking myself about what to pack but it reminds me it is a question a lot of people are asking themselves about traveling right now.  For me there was never a question of not traveling, I travel as much for the people as I do for the places, a friend pointed out on my last post that I should never settle to one passport as she sees me as a citizen of the world.  I love it when you have people in your life who see you exactly as you are and just accept you.
Yes, travel is a bit odd at the moment. 

Airports are quiet, not just from less people and not everything being open but an odd sort of hush, as if we are tiptoeing to our next destination thinking about the impact of moving forward or standing still. A certain careful caution as we step out into the world again. 
Ok with those randomly deep thoughts, I need to go and finish packing my bag....I guess the story about how I almost missed both of my flights from Birmingham to Prague will have to wait for another day!

Let's take a moment....or two and pause....Life?!

Wales, Crickhowell.... 

God I love this place, I mentioned in my last post that it is my heart home and I wasn't lying.  It's the place where I can walk down the street and no matter how long I have been gone, I know almost all shop owners and probably half of the people on the street.  It makes my heart happy when people wave and smile and ask me how long I am home for :-)

I know that for a lot of us this time is crazy, uncertain, unsettling.  For some of us it was a nice break and for some it was very far from that.  My experience was pretty awesome, I got to spend a large chunk of uninterrupted time with people I love and really don't have and probably won't have the opportunity to do that again in the near future.

Not all of it was sunshine and roses (although for Wales suprisingly, the sun shone a lot during those 3.5 months), I mean, I had some serious first world problems....

1.  I had to unpack my suitcases...completely...for that entire time....

2.  I slept in the same bed for that entire time

3.  I think the furthest I made it from where I was living was about 5.5 miles

4.  I wondered if my life would ever go back to being what I dreamed, travel, friends, family and freedom

However those traumatic events were overshadowed for the most part by other things.

1. I finally lost weight and got into shape at the same time discovering I love yoga!

2. I have it on good authority from my favorite 11 year old that I am an awesome Geography teacher and apparently I am also cool 😎 Who knew! 

3. It turns out I can cook

4. I spent a lot of time with some of my favorite people including some very distanced gin tasting in a garden close to home....

5.  Went on a lot of beautiful walks that I had never been on in the countryside around Crickhowell.

I did good, I really was where I was meant to be during this 'longer than I ever imagined it would be' life pause.  It wasn't all sunshine and roses of course.  I had my moments of not being able to get out of bed, devastated at the prospect of no more traveling, no more dream job, never seeing the faces of all my friends and the people I love who are scattered around the globe. 

Logically I knew this was not going to be the case but when faced with something so unprecedented and hugely unknown as a global pandemic that literally shut down the world.....thank god for yoga and good friends.

As Europe started to open again and, despite the moment when I put my passports on the Mayan Day of the Dead altar that Fin and I created for his school project as something that I mourned the passing of... 

....all of a sudden my passport meant something again.  Funnily enough my Czech one being more valuable at the moment than my Canadian one, who on earth ever imagined that would happen when asked why I spent 2.5 years struggling to get that passport all those years ago.

And that brings us almost up to date, the next adventure and what it is like out here traveling and sightseeing in this period of time as things are slowly and quietly coming back to life.  I promised to let you know, so prepare yourselves for the next step....the journey from Crickhowell to Prague.  

These observations may contain scenes and stories that make you feel a little bit judgmental towards countries, places and people who are at a different point of "normal" than you and your country, place and people might be, please keep those judgments to yourself 😘

The Beginning - Always a great place to start!

The beginning, although it is tough to know exactly when that was! I promise my following posts will be much shorter, but hey, a girls got set up the story, right?!

Rather than taking you all the way back to my very first trip when I was 17, mostly because even I can't remember that far back, I think I'll start with something a bit more recent....

Rewind to the week after Christmas where we find, me, laying on my mom's couch, reverting back to teenage mode.  Despite the fact that I am far from a teenager these days.

Funny how no matter how old we get, we become kids again the moment we walk thru our parents door.  Do you think that is because we are always children in their eyes?  Anyway, I digress.

I'm laying on the couch, phone in hand and my mom is talking in the background about some virus in China....

Whatever...

January arrives cold and blustery so I bundle up my dad and we head off to Cuba for a week.  What an incredibly beautiful place, I'll definitely be returning there for further exploration. Arriving back to Alberta for the tail end of a -45 deep freeze, tanned and happy.  

And by the way, the food where we were was actually really good, just in case you are wondering.

February starts with a bang! Connecticut surrounded by friends and colleagues from all around the globe.  It is one of my favorite times of the year, so amazing to be surrounded by so many like minded people, all in the same place at the same time, the buzz and the energy is indescribable.

2020 just gets even better as I head off with one of my favorite people on the adventure of a lifetime, African safari to Kenya and Tanzania.  Oh my god, it was INCREDIBLE, if you ever get the chance to go to Ngorogoro and the Serengeti in Tanzania - GO!  Your life will be forever changed.

My friend starts to see things on the news about how C-19 is getting pretty bad in Italy, she predicts it's going to get worse before it gets better and that it will most likely affect our jobs this season.  I shrug it off and still don't take it seriously - she is one smart cookie, I should have listened.

Nairobi is crazy busy, full flight, Amsterdam is heaving with people and then I am back in Canada with a couple weeks to go before I fly to the UK and then off to work at the beginning of April, right?  

And then it begins, countries closing, flights being cancelled, I begin to check my flight about 200 times a day, will I go?  Will I stay?

The day finally arrives and I say my usual 'see you laters', elbow bump my brother (this not being able to hug people, not cool) and I'm off.  I sheltered in place for almost 4 months with some really awesome people, I think we needed each other and I was exactly where I needed to be for the 'time out', in Crickhowell, my 💓 home.

Canada stops all non-essential travel the next day.