I don’t remember the last time I’ve gone so long without leaving the country…
COVID hit Ontario in 2020 just as I was transitioning between jobs. I took two weeks between leaving my last job and starting the new one, hoping to get a last-minute deal and spend some time relaxing before the new job. My last day of work was March 13. On March 12, Ontario announced schools would be closed for an extra two weeks after March Break. Our premier encouraged people to still travel and have fun on March Break. 5 days later, we were in our first lockdown. I spent my two weeks between jobs at the opposite end of the sofa.
We still hoped that our typical fall trip could go forward. We started some very light planning - primarily just thinking about where to go. It quickly became clear international travel wasn’t going to be an option in 2020 at all so we pivoted and started planning a trip to BC. We booked time off, hotels & flights. Things were looking okay through the summer. We watched the numbers in the health units in BC and soon realised we’d need to cancel the couple of days we were going to spend in Vancouver and spend all our time in wine country. We cancelled everything at the end of August when the second wave was making itself known. We looked for something closer to home but nothing worked out. We did manage a day trip a couple of hours away but otherwise, we were at the opposite end of the sofa.
For the last few years, EDP has planned a snowboarding trip. Sometimes I go. Sometimes I don’t. When we cancelled our BC plans, he started planning a January 2021 snowboarding trip for Banff. Banff is where we went at the beginning of 2020, back when you just got on an airplane all willy-nilly and your pants still fit. We had a great time so I was happy to go back. Banff had outdoor dining and all sorts of other good precautions and was asking people to come. We booked hotels & flights for late January. I held off on booking the time off this time around. Alberta introduced major restrictions in early December and Ontario went into its second lockdown on December 26. We cancelled flights and the hotel and instead, worked & stayed at the usual end of the sofa.
In August 2020, in a fit of optimism and with a tantalising deal in front of us, we booked a week in the Azores with a hotel room overlooking the water for April 2021. We thought that surely, things would be under control by then. We were supposed to leave on April 22, returning April 30. On February 22, the Canadian government began a mandatory hotel quarantine, likely until the end of April. We considered rescheduling the trip for the fall but ended up cancelling altogether. Which is good because Ontario went into its third lockdown at the beginning of April. The time off work never got booked for that one so we worked as usual & stayed at the usual end of the sofa.
But then, by the grace of science, vaccines started rolling in. And on May 22, I sobbed while the world’s most alarmed nurse wondered if she was going to have to sedate me instead of vaccinating me (okay, I always cry when I get a needle but the sobbing out of relief was new.) And we rebooked our trip to BC for the fall of 2021 as the forth wave was subsiding. And we got on an AIRPLANE and flew to the other side of the country where we went to restaurants and the aquarium and bicycled through Stanley Park and drove up to Kelowna and did some hiking and visited wineries and had the most AMAZING lunch at Mission Hill and sent entirely too much wine home (that’s a lie, there’s no such thing as too much wine but we did repurpose a bathroom as a wine cellar.) It’s not what we expected for 2021 but it felt good to be somewhere new. And then, the crazy cats that we are, we went to Banff in January! I read by a fireplace and took some long, lovely walks while EDP snowboarded and then we watched entirely too much HGTV while eating take out. It felt so good to be seeing new things again.
And now, with the fifth wave theoretically behind us and mask mandates lifted far too early (it’s a fucking mask, just put it on and stop being such a baby - things are not safe for the immunocompromised and they can’t “just stay home” because something tells me if you are so convinced that your “right” to not wear a mask is more important than their right to LITERALLY BE ALIVE, your politics probably don’t include universal basic income or expanded health care but even if you did, they still need to leave their homes to WORK and get the basic necessities of life so... Anyway. What was I saying? Right, put your mask on and…) we’ve rebooked our Azores trip! It’s expanded out by a few days and we’re staying on two of the islands now instead of just one but we have that room overlooking the water again. Have we managed to time this just right to be between waves and variants? No one knows. Do I have any pants that I’ll be able to wear? No one knows. Is my passport still valid? No one knows. But that does seem like something I should figure out pretty soon.
