travel | Bits and bobs

Normally, I’m a pretty organized traveler. While I don’t start packing in advance, I have my lists ready wayyyyyy ahead of when I need them.

I am a bit of a list queen, I have to admit. Not because my world would collapse if I didn’t have lists, but because I would forget everything if I didn’t have them. I have discovered this from sad experience.

Enough experiences that you would think I would learn.

I suppose I do learn. But I also forget. (Does forgetting negate the learning?)

There have been too many times when I’ve convinced myself I could swing it. Lists are for sissies!!!

Yeah, well…that’s never worked out for me.

Serious kudos to those of you who can keep everything up there in the ol’ grey matter and access it whenever you need it. That is a gift.

But it’s not a gift I have. So I make lists.

This time, though, I only half sort of started a list a few days ago. And put it aside. In fact I couldn’t even remember where it was so this morning I started a new one.

Did you catch that? THIS MORNING!!!

I didn’t start my list in earnest until this morning. The morning of the day I am travelling.

Man, I am living on the edge!!! (I so don’t live on the edge. I can barely see the edge…And I like it that way.)

Anyway, I got the list done, did all the last errands I had and, right down to the wire, got the packing done.

Hmmm…actually, I was late packing….yup….there it is.

I was so late packing, I forgot to run through my list to see if I had forgotten anything. And, as I wrote that last paragraph, sitting here at the airport waiting for my plane, I remembered that I forgot my hair dryer.

I had thought about it several times. And even headed off to get it a few times. But as you may recall, I get distracted easily and now, voilà – no hair dryer!!

Oh well!

I’m pretty sure (I say, chuckling at my likely delusional optimism) I didn’t forget anything else…

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My ocean view, growing up in St. Lawrence, NL

I grew up in a small town on the southeast coast of Newfoundland, a beautiful, rugged island jutting out into the North Atlantic. The ocean was a very strong presence in my youth and it has stayed with me throughout my life, even though most of my adult life has been spent away from in.

It is no surprise, then, when I say that my favourite place to recharge is by the ocean. I’m not a total snob about it – any body of water will do in a pinch, but the ocean is where it’s really at for me.

I spent almost 14 years living in Calgary, Alberta, on Canada’s prairies, about 40 minutes from the Canadian Rockies. People I knew who had grown up there got the same thing from going to the mountains. Others, who had grown up further east, fully on the prairies, got it from the vast openness of the horizon that they offered.

After having lived there for so long, I can understand both perspectives. There is something truly majestic about being in the mountains. Taking the gondola up Sulphur Mountain in Banff gives you a view and perspective that you can only get in the mountains.

I also really valued the open expanse of the prairies. There are lots of jokes about it – your dog runs away and you can see him for days and so on. Obviously, that’s not how it is, but it sure can seem like it – horizon and sky for days! It, too, offers a perspective on our place in the universe that can’t be achieved the same way in the mountains or by the ocean.

One of the things I miss the most about living on the prairies is being able to watch a storm from miles away as it crawls along the landscape – a curtain of snow or rain, or even just wind and dust, moving along the horizon like a separate living thing in and of itself. It’s truly beautiful.

Yet still, for me, it’s the ocean. I love the smell of it, the sound of it, the look of it. Standing on Signal Hill or at Cape Spear, facing east and seeing nothing but the vast expanse of blue (or steely grey on a cloudy day), knowing there’s nothing between you and Ireland except the rolling deep, gives another perspective of how we fit into this world.

Me, at Cape Spear, with Signal Hill in the background
An unruly sea at Cape Spear
Beautiful majesty at Cape Spear

You can even almost feel the pull of the swells. Even when it looks flat and calm, you know that beneath the surface there are currents constantly moving, moving, moving. The iiiiiin-out, iiiiiin-out, iiiiiin-out push and pull of the waves is hypnotic.

It was a similar feeling when I stood at Point Loma in San Diego and faced west out over the Pacific Ocean.