Tag Archives: travel

Travel to meet

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I’m in Courtney, BC, for a meeting of BC Provincial Online Learning School principals. We are fortunate that we will also be joined by the Ministry. I took the ferry here yesterday and arrived in time to join 5 other principals for a late dinner.

The dinner was enjoyable even though 80+% of the conversation was work related. That’s the nature of these meetings, because my colleagues from other districts across BC understand my job in my district better than 95% of my colleagues ‘back home’. And as we talk, we learn, we seek advice, we share, and we support one another.

All that before the meeting even starts this morning. We are principals of online school. We can easily connect online and that’s mostly how we connect. But sitting at a dinner and breaking bread together; Seeing each other face to face and in group, adds something special; And the effort made to travel to be together makes us appreciate the opportunity even more.

Travelling when young

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One of my daughters leaves for a trip to Central America today. My other daughter heads to Europe in a few months. I’ve lived a life so far with few regrets. Sure I’ve made mistakes, and I can think of things I wish I did with better outcomes, but when I reflect on my life I tend not to dwell on regrets and missed opportunities. But if I were to change one thing in my life, I would have travelled more when I was younger.

We have a lifetime to work and be productive, but at my age now I’m not going to spend time in hostels, or go backpacking across a country. My holidays will be, and have been, different than someone travelling in their 20’s. A friend of mine’s son recently rode a bicycle across the African continent. That’s not going to be something I plan to do at my age… but what an absolutely amazing experience he had!

My advice to young people is to see the world. Go to places unlike where you live. Embrace the culture of the places you visit. Go on adventures you are less likely to go in when you are older. You are only young once and the world awaits you.

Ferry travel time

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Had a couple ferry rides over the last two days. We always get reservations now, ever since our kids were 1 and 3, both sick, and we missed a ferry because it was too full. The next 2 hours waiting were awful, with two sick kids, and an hour and a half ferry ride after the extra wait. So reservations became a ‘must’ for us.

I think about how much time we spend getting from one place to another. Even with a reservation, we need to get to the terminal a minimum of 30 minutes before departure. And then there’s the 45 minute drive to the ferry, and the drive on the other side to our final destination.

There is a lot of waiting around on ferry trips. We bumped into people on the way over and had some nice chats yesterday, but for the most part the travel time goes slow. Trips home seem to take forever, and unpacking the car is never fun.

I look forward to the days when cars can fly like in the Jetsons. I hope that this happens in my lifetime. Forget about taking a ferry where my car is corralled onto a crowded boat, and the drive getting off the ferry is always in heavy traffic. I want to just set the autopilot in my car and watch an in-flight movie. No arriving to a ferry terminal early, no lineups. No reservations. Just a car zooming above the Georgia Straight, which is too long for an affordable bridge.

In Transit

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Sometimes there are trips inside of trips, and that was the case for me these past 12 days. I returned my rental car earlier today. I drove just over 1,800 kilometres while visiting my mom in Oakville, Ontario. Even if you consider that I averaged 100 kilometres per hour, which I didn’t, that would mean that on my 12 day trip I spent 18 hours driving.

Basically a full (awake) day of my holiday was in a car, and most of that time I was alone… Well not really alone, but in the good company of an audio book or conversational podcast. Still, that’s a lot of time (and distance) to spend travelling in a car while travelling away from home.

How much time do we spend in transition, going from one place to the next? I started writing this at the airport in Toronto, wrote the next bit on the plane over western Canada, and am now finishing it on my couch in Coquitlam, BC. With driving, flying, and wait time, I spent 10+ hours today in transit. So much of our vacations are spent in transit, it’s a bit of a reminder that we are always on a journey.

Packing and unpacking

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How much time do we spend in preparation for travel and events? I’ve got a 24 hour turnaround from one trip to the next and I’m thinking of everything I have to do before and during that time. From packing up our camping gear to the long drive home to laundry, it seems my mind is more on what I have to do than it is on what I’m actually doing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about being fully present recently, and I’m realizing how often my mind drifts to ‘other than now’. Reflecting, planning, preparing, and generally thinking about ‘not now’. I realize preparation for something in the future is important, and arriving somewhere unprepared is unpleasant… but I also think I waste a lot of time and energy not being fully present.

Now if you’ll excuse me, future me needs me to go have a good workout. Present me will do my best to enjoy it.

Thinking about Retirement

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Tonight I’m going to the Principal’s retirement dinner. A good friend has asked me to do his introduction before he does his retirement speech. I enjoy going to this event and seeing the past retirees. And in all honesty I’ve thought of my own retirement a fair bit recently. While I haven’t picked a date yet, it’s less than five years away… and could be as soon as two.

Whenever I talk to retirees, they always share how busy they are. There is so much to do, places to go, people to see. They are not bored and if they want, there is always work they can get. In fact there are quite a few who end up going back to work for the school district. With the retirement bubble that’s happening and a shortage of teachers, opportunities abound.

And then there is the chance to travel more. I don’t have many regrets in life, but I do wish I travelled more when I was younger, and to me retirement opens up an opportunity to make up for that. I could easily list off 10 countries I’d like to visit sooner rather than later.

The thing that I think about most when it comes to retirement is what my routine will look like. I won’t be waking up at 5am to get my workout and writing in. I will be working out for longer, I will spend more time writing. I will also be cooking more meals and eating a bit more healthy. And I’ll probably work to some extent, although I don’t yet know what that will look like? With my retirement date approaching, you might think I’d have a better handle on what I’d be doing after this, but I think enough opportunities will present themselves.

I’m not someone who gets bored. I don’t spend time wondering what to do next. Retirement for me is about creating more options for myself. I’m not running away from my job, nor am I counting the days to the transition. Rather I’m seeing it as an opportunity to do more and different things.

It’s hard not to think of retirement as I head to this dinner to celebrate the retirement of my colleagues. I look to the future and I see myself enjoying that next phase of my life. But day-to-day I try not to think about it too much. There is still work to be done and joy to be found in my work. I’m grateful to have a job that feels purposeful and meaningful, and one that doesn’t have me counting the days until the next phase of my life.

Time in cars and with friends

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Yesterday I drove 40 minutes each way to spend just over an hour and a half with friends. They were visiting from Ontario and I saw them Saturday, but it was a short visit and so I wanted to connect again.

I ended up chatting with a cousin the whole drive there, and I listened to a book on the way back. Time well spent in the car.

But more importantly, I got to chat with my friends. We had a coffee, went for a walk, bought some pastries… and we talked. We spent time some wonderful, albeit short together. I spent about 15 more minutes with them than I did in the car. It couldn’t be longer because they had to pack up, check out of the Airbnb and catch a plane. But it was long enough. It was a wonderful reconnection.

Later, my wife and I went to wish her sister a happy birthday. That was about 45 minutes in the car for an hour and a half visit. Again, well worth the drive.

Ive got a full tank, when are we meeting next? 😜

AI and languages

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I just watched a video where the new Chat GPT-4o seamlessly translated a conversation between an Italian and English speaker. I know this isn’t the first tool to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an example where I thought about how useful this is. It gave me the realization that instant language translation will revitalize diversity of language

In my travels, I’ve noticed that English is a language that is becoming more and more widespread. Not everyone knows English, but recently in both France and Spain I had far less challenges communicating compared to my travels to France 12 years earlier. I think this stems from a move towards everyone desiring to speak a common language. Want to be able to talk to people in most parts of the world? Learn English.

But maybe that desire will diminish now. If I get to speak in my mother tongue and someone who speaks English can hear a seamless translation, do I really need to learn English? Maybe in the future people will be less likely to pick up a new language? Will we see a slowdown in the acquisition of the English language?

While I think we’ll see this shift, it won’t be drastic. Yet I can see both positives and benefits to this. A positive is that people will be more likely to hold on to the language of their heritage. A negative could be that in countries with high immigration the effort to learn the country’s home language might be less desirable. While this won’t necessarily cause an issue communicating since these AI tools can help, it can potentially undermine the social fabric of the country.

And maybe that’s not as big a concern as I’m making it out to be?

Still, I’m excited about the ease with which I’ll be able to travel to countries where the primary language isn’t English. I look forward to having conversations I could not have previously had. Tools like this make almost every person in the entire world a possible acquaintance, colleague, and friend. That’s a pretty exciting thing to think about.

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As an aside, a lot of AI image creators still have issues with text, as the image accompanying this post demonstrates. This was my prompt: An English, Spanish, and French person sitting at a table, each saying “Good Morning” in their own language, in a speech bubble.

Family, fun, and fitness

I am in a tiny hotel gym near the Toronto airport, dictating this while on an elliptical. It’s 9:30 PM and we head home to Vancouver tomorrow morning just after 6 AM. It has been a whirlwind week for us. Leaving our home 2:30 in the morning last week Friday to come here for a memorial celebration of the passing of my dad.

We spent a wonderful few days up at BlueMountain, near Collingwood, with my mom, her four kids, and seven of eight grandkids. Unfortunately, the eighth grandkid was hit with Covid and didn’t recover in time to join us. Still, it was so wonderful to have our family together for the first time in over a decade with all 4 kids and that many grandkids m being present. My dad would have loved it.

My wife, kids, and mom spent the last couple nights in downtown Toronto, went shoe shopping for my mom, visited the Aquarium, and saw a musical, ‘In Dreams’. The play features Roy Orbison music and my mom loved it. We all did. I was worried when it started with a side story of a woman losing her husband, but that wasn’t the focus of the show and didn’t ruin the mood despite the recency of my fathers passing.

Today we went back to my mom’s place, hung out and ordered Caribbean style Doubles from a roti shop. I really wish I could find some good West Indian takeout in Coquitlam, and since I can’t, I always make sure I get some when in Toronto.

I probably should be getting to bed right now with a 3:30 AM wake up call, but I hadn’t had any exercise other than walking at my moms pace for three days now, and I’m not sure what I’ll feel like doing tomorrow after a long day of travel. So, I am using speech to text and panting slightly, unsure of how much editing I will need to do when I get off this machine.

I remember hearing that by the time you’re 18 you have spent roughly 95% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Losing my dad has really made me put this statistic into perspective. I think about my daughters at 21 and 23, and I’m actually grateful that one still lives with us, and I already see how hard it is to plan to get together with the older one who lives an hours drive and an hour and a half ferry ride away from us.

I’m actually thankful for covid in that it was the reason my siblings and mom started a group chat and that has increased my communication with my mom and sisters. Seeing my sisters’ now grown up kids has been wonderful too, and I really question where the time has gone. It occurred to me that my oldest nephew is older than I was when I had my first kid. That seems so hard to grasp. I am now the generation that I think my parents should be. Looking at old photographs, I find pictures of my parents as adults when they were younger than I am now, and yet in my mind I’m still just a kid… Their kid.

Cardio is done, I’ve edited my voice-to-text writing above and it’s time to put on Enya and do my stretches. I’ll keep thinking and reflecting on my time with family, and then I’ll crank the music and get a little bit of strength exercise in. I like doing a variety of exercises at hotels, using machines I don’t get to use in my simple home gym.

Tomorrow, I travel home then start to worry about catching up at work. It’s going to be a bit painful, but I’m glad to have had this time, and it know how much it meant to my mom… and to me!

Traffic flow

We are staying in an AirBNB in downtown Toronto with my mom. It’s a small 3-bedroom apartment on the 6th floor, just above the Gardener Expressway. I needed earplugs to go to sleep last night. The flow of traffic is a little too uneven to be a constant background noise.

I remember a funny line from Robin Williams as Mork, playing an alien from another planet, on the sitcom Mork & Mindy. He comes in one day and asks Mindy, “Why do they call it ‘rush hour’ when nothing moves?”

Any city as big as Toronto has a buzz, and never sleeps. The highway below us has a constant, congested flow of traffic and as I write this at almost 5:30pm the traffic is crawling going both east and west. But even at 2am there will be a flow of traffic. I don’t think there is a time during the day when there would be no cars on the small strip of road outside this apartment’s window.

Sometimes when I’m on the road at 2am I wonder as I drive, “Where are all these other cars going?” And, “Where are they coming from?”

How are so many other people on the road right now? Is this a regular routine or an unusual anomaly in their travel patterns? Are they coming home from a long day? A fun night? Or are they just starting their day?

Tonight I’ll put my earplugs in and ignore the traffic flow, cars each heading to their own destinations… destinations I’ll never know.