Hitting The Bricks

I'm not a natural traveler -- I'm not terribly adventurous, I don't like physical discomfort, I regularly get lost in the Rideau Centre and those zip off travel pant thingees look TERRIBLE on me. I've married a man who loves to travel, though, and if he's insistent that we jet off somewhere wonderful every few years, well, marriage is sacrifice.

This trip has required a lot of prep work, though... We decided to rent our house for a couple of months in order to fund our voyage, so that involved Kijiji and Craigs List, weeding out the Internet scammers, responding to a flood of interest only to watch all of the potential renters walk away when they learned that yes, though we were planning to rent our house in July, no, we didn't have air conditioning. Eventually we got the house rented to some lovely people who seemed to be neater and cleaner than us, and probably better parents too.

Once the house was taken care of, we had to plan where we were going, organize flights, arrange where to stay and coordinate car rentals and booking time off work. Turns out that it's important to double check what day your flight ACTUALLY departs from Canada before arranging where to stay, organzing car rentals and booking time off work, but as long as you find out a week or so before you fly off on a three country, two continent adventure, you can easily do damage control on that little snafu.

We then had to get organized with what we were bringing (hardly anything, according to Andrew who has to "carry" everything and doesn't like our suitcases to be too "heavy"). Finally there's the whole winding down from work business, which can be stressful at times until you realise that you are in fact just a small cog in a vast bureaucratic machine and that your own individual actions are essentially meaningless.... then it becomes surprisingly easy to turn that "out of office" message on.

Not being a natural traveler  all of these activities cause me a low level stress, which was heightened for this trip by the fact that we had cleverly rented our place out ten days before we actually left the country. This meant that we had made ourselves homeless in our own city. Luckily we have very generous friends and family to impose upon, but even still, there is a constant worry that Violet will spill something stain-y or rip something precious (truthfully that anxiety is mostly around my own actions -- there is a reason one of my childhood nicknames was, imaginatively, Clutz). Anyhoots, what began to sustain me in those last days of work, house guesting and running around doing all of the panicked final prep in the sickening Ottawa humidity was the thought of the large glass of wine I was going to drink at the Ottawa Airport Departure lounge...

The thought of that glass -- cold, crisp, filled with wonderuflly numbing properties and what it represented -- luggage checked, work done, holiday started was extremely sustaining as I sweated through those last Ottawa days, tracking down sun hats, picking up Malaria pills and loading up on Dora the Explorer colouring books.

Let me tell you, that glass lived up to expectation... 

Departure Wine