Off the Couch and On the Road

Ok, just to make sure you understand the background of my experience with dates and times – I am quite good with a diary, a calendar, a mobile alarm and lots of people reminding me about appointments. I really am. But when your travelling, dates, days, times and details don’t take such a prevalence to things like where you are, what you’re experiencing, and where the closest coffee shop is. At the end of the day, I haven’t been all that great with dates over the past year, purely because I haven’t needed to be.

So when the sister and I woke up that final day at the exact same moment and looked at each other, I already knew what she was going to say. It had something to do with realising that her flight back to Sydney was that night, and not the following night as we had planned (well, planned is a very loose term, let’s use the word assumed instead).

We hightailed it back to Vancouver and just got her fed and packed, a taxi waiting outside, and then she was gone, and I was there eating a kebab with pepsi and biding my time until my flight the next morning. And that was it. I was going home.

-Sarah

The countdown had begun to the end of my RTW trip, and I mentally prepared myself by repeating the words ‘house’, ‘job’ and ‘credit card debt’ until I felt comfortable enough that I didn’t shudder. It had gone by so fast that I couldn’t believe it was almost at an end. And I didn’t want it to end with tired feet and a Starbucks smile pastered on my face. I wanted to come home rosy pink from the snow-chilled wind with a inner glow of exuberance from my travels. So we decided, before we caught our flight home, to head over to Vancouver Island for a week and get our rosy cheeks and inner glow up to scratch.

My Starbucks customer, Steve, told me the travelling through the islands on the ferry was the ‘most spectacularly beautiful thing’ he’s ever seen. He must have travelled to Vancouver Island on a perfect summers day , maybe even the same day the photographers from all the travel brochures went. They might have even bumped into each other on the ferry, smiling with a ‘great day, eh?’ as they passed each other. Because I can tell you, our ferry trip included some stunning grey water, rain, grey clouds and grey mist. Reminded me of Scotland. The 4.5hr journey brought us to Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, which really did remind me of Scotland, cobblestones and all.

Victoria was a very small city, no skyscrapers or endless rows of office blocks, and there was only one undercover mall. There were quirky cafes, independant cinemas and lots of second-hand bookstores, all in all very European.

Of course, because of the weather, the wildlife watching cruise we booked was cancelled until our third day – so we made do with walks around the harbour and through the city, stopping regularly for coffee, afternoon naps and snacks, eventually making it down to the ‘Prince of Whales’ wildlife cruise operators the following day after walking to James Bay and up to the coastal lighthouse for a view across Haro Strait.

The ‘cruise’ was really a jetboat hosting 6 passengers (5 of us Australian) and the speed, bumps and turns made it a ride in itself. But we did see wildlife and had some fantastic scenic views of the forests, inlets and caves along the coastline of Vancouver Island. We saw seals, elephant seals, harbour seals, sea lions, the American bald eagle and lots of birds, stunning coastline with the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, USA in the distance as well as the beautiful, rough currents and smooth waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

It was, in a word, amazing. We came back frozen to the bone and were served a hot chocolate and an apology by our captain for not seeing any Orca whales (we hadn’t expected to, it was the wrong season) despite this area having the most abundant numbers of Orcas in the world. We thawed out with some McDonald’s and had a very early night with a book.

The following few days we took some more walks, had an incident where a wild doormouse tried to attack us for the chips we were carrying, visited the historical ‘Craigdarroch Castle’ house and the wax museum (not as good as London’s, of course, but a lot cheaper and good for a touristy afternoon), watched a movie and spent lots of time reading and drinking coffee.

We were so relaxed, we didn’t even need to try to obtain the rosy cheeks and inner glow. It all came naturally.

-Sarah

Our time in Vancouver passed swiftly, the only real measurement being the seemingly sudden change from sunny days warmed by the kaleidescope of fall colours, to the cold, bare trees and bright white of winter snow.

Working in a coffee shop during the week, we spent our weekends sightseeing in Vancouver, mostly on foot, standing on Capilano suspension bridge overlooking mountains of fir trees one day, and walking the entire circumference of Stanley park the next.

The wages were terrible, by Australian standards, and so we neither ventured far nor lived it up, but as I told those who sounded amazed that we weren’t going ‘there’, living and working in a different country was a travelling experience in itself, right? (And then I cried because, damn it, we could afford to go ‘there’, wherever it was).

Being Sydney girls, we were amazed by the snow and it’s everchanging state, and began to look at the clouds as perhaps Tim Bailey might, and nod, mumbling to ourselves that yes, there would be snow tonight.

We shopped and dined, danced and drank, slept and watched movies, and became intensely familiar with the names of streets, the neighbourhoods, friends and customers – until one day someone asked me where I was from and I stared blankly at them, replying, “Oh, just down on West 13th”.

We fell in love with Vancouver, especially over the holiday season, where Santa and his thermal coast and sleigh made perfect sense, and we could make snowmen in our front yard and hum tunes about Jack Frost nipping at our noses, with ease. We had dreamed of a white Christmas – and although we both worked Christmas day and trudged through the freezing sleet/snow/rain there and back – I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In retrospect of course. Ideally we would have been sipping hot chocolates on a mountain resort somewhere, watching chestnuts roast and whatnot, but damn it, we couldn’t afford to go ‘there’ either.

-Sarah

And so it was that after seven months of travelling – of packing and repacking, waiting in airports and taxis, haggling and deciphering maps, laying on beaches and gazing in museums – I had found a place to settle, for a little while, at least.

It was luxurious, a studio within a heritage house in the suburbs, where I could enjoy a real bed and a bath, central heating, free phone calls and internet (the pinnacle of a travellers wish list). The sister and I slept in, watched TV, went shopping, read books and enjoyed the changing colours from fall into winter, like a rainy weekend that never ended.

We half-heartedly looked for work, turning up for some interviews and not for others – started work in a fashion retail store one day and quit the next. Once we both happily secured jobs in a coffee shop and were planning the weekly shopping list, it hit me. I needed to leave, to go somewhere, to see something. Man, I needed to travel.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I casually mentioned to the sister, who had endured flight delays, typhoons in Taiwan and a night in a dodgy hostel with a buddist monk to finally arrive in Vancouver less than a week before.

“Sure,” she said dryly. “Whatever.”

Visions of trekking Maccu Pichu, shopping in New York and horse riding in the Grand Canyon immediately sprung to mind. I was just about to whip out the credit card when she made her point.

“But we can’t afford to go now. We’ll work and then we’ll travel,” she said.

Right. Good point. For now, we were settled, back on the couch. For a little while, at least.

-Sarah

The 15-hour bus ride from Calgary to Vancouver seemed to pass three times as fast as a 5-hour flight ever could. I spent most of that time trying to find an adjective appropriate in describing the colour of the water at the base of the snow-capped mountains in Banff National Park. It was clearly cold, frozen at some points, rushing at others, sometimes so still as to perfectly reflect the leaves from the tree branches above.

Tinffany blue, I decided, and then immediately regretted my choice. Tiffany’s didn’t exactly conjure up images of stunning mountains surrounded by low clouds, snowflakes melting in the blinding sun. But it was Tiffany blue, I thought. Perfectly.

The scenery made the trip somewhat enjoyable, though by the time I had arrived at 9.30pm in Vancouver, British Columbia, I was so tired I couldn’t muster up any excitement of being in a new city. And this could be the city – the house and job and real life city, for a few months at least – so the pressure was on for it to be palatable. A new day would tell.

I woke the next morning to clear blue skies, not-so-cold temperatures and a boundless energy usually reserved for end-of-season sales. And Vancouver was beautiful. I walked from one side of the harbour, across the city, to the other, and window-shopped, explored and sat in the sun admiring the yachts, thinking that instead of a choice of which neighbourhood I did want to live in, I would be hard pressed to find a neighbourhood I didn’t.

Palatable? Definitely. The sister was arriving in two days, joining me for the last leg of my adventure, and I couldn’t wait to have someone to discover the city with. And slightly expand my wardrobe options too, of course.

-Sarah