Longer ways to go

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

Jack Kerouac

The Kickass Canada Girl and I have been most fortunate in that during our time together (not far short of a decade and a half now) we have been able to travel both widely and well. We might not have ventured to quite such far-off and exotic places as have other friends of ours, but we have derived nonetheless a great deal of pleasure – joy even – from our joint excursions.

It probably goes without saying that foremost amongst those trips were our Atlantic crossings to Canada. We visited in 2006 (my introduction to both the country and to British Columbia) and 2008. We were back in the summer of 2010 to get married (whoopee!) and again in the spring of 2011 for less happy reasons. Those who have followed this blog throughout will recall that The Girl came to Victoria early in 2012 for a job. In the ten months that she was here and I was still in England we both traversed the ocean several times to see each other before her return to the UK in the November of that year.

Finally we visited at Christmas time in 2013 with the additional pleasure of celebrating my sixtieth birthday at the Wickanninish Inn on Chesterman Beach outside Tofino.

I say ‘finally’, but of course our real final crossing – to date – was in July of 2015 when we moved with all of our goods and chattels from the UK to Vancouver Island.

In the nearly four years since that momentous event we have not ventured in the direction of the United Kingdom or Europe… until now! (For those who have not been following these scribblings – I leave for the UK in two days time).

A dear friend here in BC asked me the other day how I felt about going back to the country of my birth. I told him the truth: I am really not at all sure how I feel about it. I am certainly looking forward to seeing family, friends and acquaintances and it will be good to visit some of the old haunts again. Beyond that I currently feel somewhat ambivalent – a feeling most likely re-enforced by the current political chaos there. I will just have to be prepared for any eventuality and I will – of course – document the experience in full in this journal.

Even more pertinently, perhaps, the friend asked me how I thought I would feel when – after nearly a month away – I returned to Victoria in June. I told him what I expected to feel. We will just have to wait to see how accurate is that expectation.