Now that the world is opening up again, I got thinking about where I would like to go on my next vacation. When we were in lockdown, most countries were shut to travelers except a few islands offering sun and beaches. At that time, it seemed very appealing to be on a beach and to escape somewhere but I didn’t want to quarantine when getting back into Canada so opted to wait until the borders opened up. Eighteen months have gone by, and now it’s easier to travel but my priorities in life have shifted somewhat. With so many options open now for travel, I’m not sure where I want to go. It’s like the more choices I have the harder it is to pick a place. I wonder why that is? I feel, if I go somewhere, I want it to have some substance and bring meaningful experience, enrich my life and not just to escape. Maybe with all the time spent at home during restrictions, I found more value in my life? I would like to think so. I’ve never really put much thought in the past as to why I travel where I do. I think I use to travel to escape work and destress, now I feel more grounded in who I am, and my travelling needs to add significance onto that and compliment my goals of where I want my life to move toward. There’s also a part of me that wants to stay in Canada again this year and support my own country and the businesses here, contribute to others more than myself.
I was looking back on all the trips I have been on and thinking about what it was that pulled me to go there. I thought if, I gather some information out of that to help decide where my next holiday will be this year, then it will aid in my decision to go or stay closer to home. I actually pulled out some memories I had not thought about in a few decades – I had a good laugh, some tears and even some aha moments.
Reflecting back…
My first trip outside of Canada was when I was 24. My girlfriend KC and I went on a 3-week Caribbean holiday. Two fun filled weeks on a cruise ship and then a week at a resort on Barbados Island. I had no idea what to expect on that holiday, but it opened up a world of adventure and I wanted to see more of this world and make interesting connections. For me, I soon recognized the best part of travelling, is meeting the locals, witnessing their culture and a glimpse into the lives of other tourists. I have met people and formed friendships from all over the world that I still keep in touch with occasionally. Travelling has enriched my life in many ways. That first holiday was such a blast. The cruise ship we were on was very small and KC and I were the only 2 single girls on that boat for 2 whole weeks. There were mostly families and couples as it was over the Christmas holiday and New Year. We quickly discovered that the entertainment and music provided by the ship consisted of all males mostly single as well and they had been doing this cruise for over a year. We soon found out they made great tour guides whenever we docked for the day on shore and informed us of the best sites to take in and what to stay away from. Imagine, being on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean for 14 days and being pursued by every single male on that boat, it was such a great confidence booster, that I wish I would have bottled some of that up! I realize now this trip holds some of the best memories I have from my twenties as it held so many coincidences and randomness that I couldn’t have dreamed that big at the time. When we got to the resort in Barbados, unknown to us, the World Wind Surfing Championships were being held at our resort and we found ourselves to be the only females at the entire resort. This isn’t something that would appeal to me now in my fifties, but as a single woman in my early twenties, this was the jackpot – International men from all over the planet gathered in one glorious place to catch the wind in their sails coming off the ocean, competing for that world title and prize money. You could smell the competitive testosterone the moment we stepped out of the taxi that first day. We were so exhausted from clubbing every night into the wee hours of the morning on the ship over the last two weeks and all we could think of was rest and relaxation on the beach and detoxing our livers for the next 7 days. Somehow the universe had other plans for us. We played water polo, beach volleyball and drove around on quads and explored all over the island with new people we met. We did some nightclubbing, night swimming and were catered to by the resort guests and staff – who would want to leave that and go home? But, eventually, it was over, and, in that week, I met someone who I thought was the man of my dreams – a fireman from Paris who took up a lot of my time in the last few days before heading home. It was one of those vacation romances where you let down your guard and could be your true self. No cares about work, finances and the bills waiting for you when you get home, or the other responsibilities. I was a single parent at the time with a 3-year-old who was spending the Christmas holidays with her dad, and as much as I missed her, I didn’t miss the worries, stress and dauntingness of doing it all yourself day in and day out that comes with being a single parent. I could pretend to be someone else as far as my life went but with letting my hair down and being true to the soul. My fireman couldn’t speak much English and I not much French, but somehow, we still got each other and were determined to keep in touch. We did for a few months after I got home, but it was difficult with the 7-hour time change and the language barrier. This part makes me laugh, I had a couple neighbors in the apartment building I lived in that were from Quebec and spoke fluent French and English, so every time my fireman called, I would ask him to wait and would run down the hall to the neighbors and they would actually come to my apartment and translate our entire 15-30 conversation, it’s crazy looking back on it. People in long distance relationships now a days have it so easy, with technologies like email, skype, facetime, zoom and programs that automatically translate languages for you. It super funny thinking about that time in my life and it makes me smile and laugh, we tried but for obvious reasons the romance fizzled out.
On another trip, 15 years, another child and a divorce later, I had a similar encounter that created a brief long-distance romance with another man from Paris in the early days of online communication when only AOL and yahoo mail were coming onto the scene. It was easier to stay in touch and his English was excellent. He was a personalized pilot for one of the richest men in the world and his life involved flying his employer to all these amazing places for business or pleasure and my pilot friend got to hang out until his boss was ready to jet off someplace else a couple of weeks or longer down the road. He had some awesome stories of his adventures being among the rich and famous, in the most exotic places around the world and he’d been doing this for years. My sister Samaya, 18-year-old daughter Amanda and 12-year-old son Jayden and I ventured off to the island of Grenada in 2007. Amanda wanted to get her master dive license and the rest of us just wanted to relax on the beach. Our first night there, my sister and I headed off to the local club to get our dance on and I met the pilot Laurent. I think I still had the magical feeling of the last time I was single, on a tropical island and met my french fireman, that when I first heard Laurent speak, I was taken back to my twenties, and I was all in on seeing him as much as possible on this trip. He hung out at our beach and in the evenings, we did nice dinners. As it turned out, our flight back to Canada was scheduled within the hour of when Laurent was leaving the island as well. However, we said our goodbyes the night before as he would be considered at work once he got to the airport, but we were determined to meet up again on a holiday somewhere in the future.
The next morning, my sister, kids and I are at the airport waiting for the boarding call. If you’ve never been to these airports on islands, they have the planes board and offload from the tarmac and then you walk into a building for customs, security and grabbing or dropping off your luggage. On these hot tropical islands, there quite often isn’t even windows in this building to allow for the breeze to blow through to keep things cool for the amount of people usually packed into the airport waiting to leave or to check in on arrival. We had already gone through security and were waiting in a line with hundreds of other tourists leaving for home when I get a moment like something you would see in the movie Top Gun! Out of know where, a man gets out of a small private jet on the runway, walks across the tarmac towards the building. I can see people pointing at this pilot and he’s wearing a white uniform and pilot’s hat just like what Tom Cruise wore in the movie and he’s making his way through the crowds and I can hear other women saying how handsome this man in uniform was. He walked through a few hundred-people weaving in and around the lineups and as he got closer to us, Samaya said, that’s Laurent and he made his way up to me, said hi and gave me the most romantic kiss I have ever had. The whole airport started clapping and whistling, it really was something out of the movies and a very special moment for me. I was swept off my feet and my sister and I still talk about how amazing and unbelievable that moment was. My kids say they don’t remember but they probably don’t choose too as it was the first time they had seen me be kissed by someone other than their father. That moment was a self-esteem booster for sure and I headed home on top of the world.
Laurent and I kept in touch for a few years. We tried meeting up in different places around the world but every trip I had planned seemed to interfere with his work schedule and where in the world his boss had taken him. My daughter and I went to the south of France later that year and it almost worked out that he would be able to come meet us but in the end his boss stayed in another part of the world a week longer than originally scheduled. So long story short here, I am still looking for my French guy to sweep me off my feet! I do like travelling to France as it always reminds me of my fireman and pilot and those moments they made me feel special. All this reminiscing has me thinking, there maybe a trip to Paris in my near future! Those were my travel romance stories and it feels good to reminisce about that, I mean what women wouldn’t want her Humphry Bogart Casablanca moment!
On that trip to the south of France, Amanda and I stayed in Nice and did day trips to Cannes and took in some of the film festival, and the grand prix in Monte Carlo. It’s a great experience to be there when all the movie stars are as well and back then the film festival was highlighting Oceans 12 with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. We never got a live glimpse of them but did get photos of us walking down the red carpet these stars would be gracing their precense with. The paparazzi was everywhere. We also had our first experience of being brave enough to go topless at the beach and hotel rooftop pool. We had been to European beaches before but with my ex-husband and son and it never felt appropriate but on this all girls trip we didn’t hold back and we felt carefree enough to blend in with the others and as the day went on it became easier and easier then, it was an everyday normal event. A few years prior we had been to the Greek island of Mykonos which is the party island for the rich and famous and my son was 10 at the time. There’s a famous nudist beach there called Paradise Beach and in all of Greece, the bathrooms are unisex. That’ s becoming more common here in Canada now at some night clubs and restaurants where the younger generations hang out but back in the early 2000’s, to us Canadians, it was pretty foreign. I’ll never forget when we first got to the beach, Jayden ran down to the water right away and spent 2 hours focused on this sand castle he was building and after that time, he looks up and over at us with a disgusted look on his face and says “hey, no-one has clothes on, what kind of beach is this?” We laughed about that for quite a while, boys certainly go through their phases, and now at 25, I’m sure if he has another opportunity to be at a nudist beach in Europe, that would be the first thing he notices and enjoys! I have to say it’s one thing to be fully clothed on a nudist beach, but it gets kind of awkward to be in a bathroom with the opposite sex who is naked; you find your stall, and get in and out very quickly.
I’ve done many trips with friends to Europe for special events, like golfing, concerts, 40th birthday parties, and for outlandish shopping and they all had a purpose behind them – to celebrate or take in an activity we enjoyed. And then there were vacations where I just needed to escape and would take off on my own. These trips by myself allowed for reflection and clarity about my life. Although too often when I came home and was back to work and life, I soon forgot about what I learned that I wanted to enhance in my life and I would slowly drift right back to where I was before the trip. It would be great to be able to bottle up that high you get to bring back home and extend it further instead of getting the post vacation blues after the high wears off. The question I have now is, what is that feeling, it must be more than just from the freedom of not working and being relaxed? If I can figure that out, then it may be easier to integrate that here at home and not feel I need to travel so much.
On all these trips, they held fantastic memories where I learnt how others live whether that be the happiness that can come from living in a third world country or in wealthy mansions atop cliffs in Spain. The experience that comes from being at an outdoor 5 day concert event with 85,000 people like T in the Park in Scotland or staying in a Hobbit cabin at Loch Ness in the highlands, or hiking in the rainforest in Costa Rica, or snorkeling at the reef in Belize, or strolling the streets of Havana, to watching geysers shooting into the gorgeous aqua colour lagoons in Azores or staring in awe at the famous painting The Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel or in Athens looking at the Acropolis temple or admiring the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris or the experience of walking along with Tiger Woods and other great golfers like Louis Oosthuizen and Rory McIlroy around the oldest course in the world at the home of golf in St. Andrews, there has been meaning to all these trips for my love of history and connecting with amazing people. And even the vacations I took to escape on the beach by myself, I did take away things that add meaning to my life, I sometimes chose to ignore it when I got back home with the hustle and bustle distractions instead of incorporating it into my daily routine. I realize now, the same experiences can happen at home, I can take that same excitement, relaxation, let my hair down sensation into my every day, I just need to choose that and be creative. Seeing something in another place that has meaning for you or pulls you like standing on ground where the romans did thousands of years ago might be different but going to a beach to lay in the sun and reflect can just as easily be done here in the city by a river or walking a nature path.
The more I started examining who I was on my trips, the more questions I had and the clarity that started to form around some interesting patterns for me. Why was it so easy for me to have these romances so far away from home? Why was I not able to form those connections in my own city of over a million people? I realized I need to duplicate the fun, carefree, loving and risk taking behaviour I display when I am on vacation right here in my everyday life. I don’t have to be so serious just because I have responsibilities with work and earning a living.
I invite you to look back at your holidays and see what is reflected there for you. Is there joy, gratitude, love found there? I know we aren’t supposed to live in the past, however, I think sometimes we need to revisit to move forward or appreciate where we are.