It
was an interesting summer. My trip out to the west coast at the end of
June was almost too fast. I don't think that I spent much more than a
total of an hour standing on the side of the road waiting for a ride. I
met some nice people - all of whom had interesting lives and great
stories to tell. The weather had been great and the one time it
seriously rained, I was in a vehicle.
The trip on the way back was quite different. While I did manage to get from Nanaimo to Calgary in a bit less than 24 hours, it was hard travelling. It was very wet, cold, windy and I needed multiple rides to get that far. The rest of the trip was marked by long waits and short rides. The people that I met were interesting and without exception - I wished that I could have sent more time with each of my drivers. Not just because I would have wished for a longer ride, but because our conversations were not close to being finished.
The trip on the way back was quite different. While I did manage to get from Nanaimo to Calgary in a bit less than 24 hours, it was hard travelling. It was very wet, cold, windy and I needed multiple rides to get that far. The rest of the trip was marked by long waits and short rides. The people that I met were interesting and without exception - I wished that I could have sent more time with each of my drivers. Not just because I would have wished for a longer ride, but because our conversations were not close to being finished.
I
suspect that if I had not had that 18 hour unplanned layover at the
Regina truck stop, I would have gotten home without taking the bus but the
time spent there not only discouraged me for a while, but it also used
up time I needed to be travelling.The fact that it was cooler, windier and that the sun was setting sooner than I was use to made the trip a bit more challenging.
On
the other hand, on the way back, I had constant reminders that of how
generous people can be in other ways than just by offering rides. I saw
parts of the country in ways I never have, I learnt about gold mining
towns, life in China for a missionary, why my charcoal filter in my Yaris
has moisture in it, what a boiler maker does, a clearer understanding
of some of the issues facing people in our First Nations communities and
a thousand other things that are now part of my memory and my
conversational repertoire.
In between the two big trips it
was a great summer - travelling was generally easy, the weather great
and the fact that both of my kids and all four of my grand kids were in the same spot at the same time was a
bonus beyond measure.
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