On The Road Again!

I am finally getting away for a while. Yay! 

It’s not a far away trip, it is local, but it is to an area of BC that I have never been to, even though I have lived half my life here. On Thursday Sept. 3rd, I drove up to Woss, on the northern part of Vancouver Island, using the old highway along the coast to visit my sister there for a couple of nights.

What a relaxing time with my sister. We took a couple of walks: one with the purpose of picking some of the late blackberries; the other was just a walk but on our route we found many huckleberry bushes still in berry! Both walks were very tasty!  We also drove up Mount Cain and explored some of the logging roads on the way, looking at the views and taking pictures. 

On Saturday, I drove back down to Comox and took a ferry over to Powell River, on the mainland. The area from there to Gibsons, near West Vancouver, is known as the Sunshine Coast and I have not visited it before. I’ll spend about a week exploring the small communities along the coast before taking a ferry to West Vancouver and another to Nanaimo, on the island before returning to Parksville. I have often heard of this circle route and others have told me how lovely a trip it is. A bonus is that the weather forecast is for hot sunny days for at least that long, possibly even longer. How fortunate!

I am very impressed with BC Ferries management of this virus. If you leave your car for any reason, on land or at sea a mask is required. And when there were a few people walking in the lot waiting to board, without masks, they made an announcement on the intercom to remind them. I did go up through the main deck to the outside ares to take some photos and everything was well organized and signed for distancing.

Foreign . . . at home.

Well, this post reflects a condition very different to the title of the blog. 

I chose 'Not Foreign Anymore' because usually once someone experiences something new it is no longer foreign and can often become familiar. However, the current situation is anything but. This new way of life continues to feel very foreign, especially as there continue to be small increases in restrictions in our communities with time. 

The 'foreign' has invaded what should be familiar.

I have, however, also experienced many blessing in the months leading up to and during this period of physical distancing and self-isolation even though they certainly didn’t feel like blessings when they were occuring.

My blessings began with the scare of possible thyroid cancer at the end of July. I was supposed to leave on a round the world trip that, hopefully, would have lasted more than a year. But 4 days before my first leg to Australia for 3 months, I learned that I had to stay and get further evaluation, then surgery to remove half my thyroid along with a very large nodule. This meant that I had to look for an apartment and get my things out of storage so that I would have a place to recover. As I was waiting for and recovering from surgery in September - October the fires in Australia were increasing in size and number in the states that I would have been visiting.

The next blessings were the news that my growth, while large was not cancerous. This was received 2 weeks before my Mexican leg of the trip was to begin, so I was able to buy a ticket to continue on with this portion of the trip, for which I had reservations that I would not have been reimbursed for if I had to cancel as they included timeshare reservations where the points would just have been lost.

 Since I now had an apartment I knew that I would have to return home at the end of January, after being in Mexico for 2½ months,  instead of continuing on with the following leg in Colombia, Peru & Ecuador. 

As things progressed with the current COVID-19 situation, and we all ended up with physical distancing being our new reality, I realized that I would have been in Peru when all the international flights got locked down. Not only would I be in a country whose borders had closed completely, waiting for a chance of a seat on one of the Canadian rescue flights, but if I had made it back, I would now be in self quarantine in a hotel near an airport somewhere in either Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto or Montreal. After 2 weeks, assuming I am still well, I would be faced with looking for an apartment and trying to find movers who are still working, to transfer my belongings. It would be a nightmare!

 

Instead, I am again blessed 

– to be healthy and safely living in my apartment just 1 km from this beach on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada!!!