Posts tagged with "travel"

Greyhound Home

Thumbnail: Bus seats
Thumbnail: Sleepy Passenger
Thumbnail: Half way scenery

I’m on my way home. It’s ear­ly morn­ing, and the air is clean and clear. Everyone on the bus is asleep, and even­tu­al­ly I suc­cumb to the drowsi­ness.

Half-way through is the Log Cabin, a Greyhound autho­rized stop that’s a com­bi­na­tion con­ve­nience store and restau­rant. Out of the dozens of times I’ve trav­eled this route, I nev­er get off the bus. It’s some pho­bia I have of los­ing my seat, or los­ing my place, or for­get­ting to get back on, but this day I grab my cam­era and step off, giv­ing up to my wan­der­lust.

This shag­gy, old build­ing, locat­ed on the side of a two-lane asphalt road stretch­ing end­less­ly, is sur­round­ed by wilt­ing trees and grass. There’s noth­ing else around but an aban­doned red struc­ture 50 metres away. I walk behind. To my sur­prise is a frozen riv­er run­ning par­al­lel to the high­way, a stark win­ter scene I rarely get to see. The ele­va­tion and veg­e­ta­tion keeps this hid­den from my view on the bus.

And once again, I’ve tak­en a chance, and this is my reward.

Personal Horizon

Andrew and Alex are going on a back­pack­ing trip to Europe until the end of this month. They’ve request­ed a list of peo­ple inter­est­ed in receiv­ing infor­ma­tion and details about their trip, so nat­u­ral­ly I let them know that I’d like to have some doc­u­men­ta­tion dur­ing their jour­ney.

And while I under­stand their moti­va­tions for try­ing to have such an inter-per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence, I don’t under­stand why it has to be because of a trip.

Isn’t every­day life inter­est­ing enough to talk about? Can’t one learn as much on the bus ride to work as being some place com­plete­ly for­eign? I nev­er decid­ed to make an extra blog or some­thing for my trip to Hong Kong/China/Macau, even though it was still a some­what life-chang­ing event. To me, the month was anoth­er part of my sched­ule, some­thing I had planned to do. It was as sig­nif­i­cant as any­thing else going on in my life, or maybe I should say, any­thing else going on in my life was as sig­nif­i­cant as that. I hope I nev­er have to rely on trav­el to con­sid­er my life impor­tant enough to dis­cuss with some­one.

Perhaps, I feel like I still have so much to learn about every­thing else that I would gain as much just think­ing in the show­er as I would being exposed to new things. Every day can be excit­ing. Every sec­ond, there’s a chance to learn and grow. There are still so many things to fig­ure out.

And I prob­a­bly con­sid­er myself to be one of the biggest.

Tremblant '04

Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1
Tremblent cabin 1

Got back from Tremblant today. A bunch of us rent­ed a cab­in for the week­end about ten min­utes away from the moun­tain. I went snow­board­ing, or rather attempt­ed to snow­board, on Saturday. There was a heavy fog at the top of the moun­tain and vis­i­bil­i­ty was extreme­ly lim­it­ed, although the tem­per­a­ture hov­ered around a pleas­ant ‑5°C, a far cry from the ‑46°C from last year. I’ve def­i­nite­ly improved over the last time that I went, although I still can’t carve on the toe side. Every inch of my body is stiff now, from my neck to my ankles, but it was worth it.

Tubing 1
Tubing 2

We stopped by a lit­tle hill made for snow tub­ing on the way home. It only cost $17 to use the facil­i­ties for four hours, and there’s even a con­vey­or sys­tem to drag the inner tubes to the top so peo­ple don’t have to walk up, the ulti­mate in lazy recre­ation. The hill was divid­ed into eight lanes, each with it’s own char­ac­ter­is­tic bumps and jumps, and we tried to link up our tubes in var­i­ous con­fig­u­ra­tions such as mul­ti-per­son daisy chains and leg locked lines. Possibly the best bang for the buck ever.