travel

My eventual goal is to see the entire world, although it looks for the moment as if we'll have to skip a few places as they swirl down the toilet of internal politics and warfare. I like travelling because it reveals to us that people are both exactly the same and vastly different from place to place. What always strikes me are the little things: plumbing, breadsticks, exit signs, rituals of how to cross the street or leave a tip. These small signs reveal the constructedness of human society and human behaviour, indicating that really, there's no darn good reason to do things the way we do. It's just that we've gotten used to doing it that way, and there are plenty of other ways for it to work.

I also find travelling inherently humourous. People are funny, social organization is funny, and structural quirkiness is funny. There is an element of the surreal at all times, especially when actually in transit: it's a no-woman's land of time obsession (gotta catch the plane, train, or automobile) and timelessness (the airport or bus station is full of people going somewhere else, it is always full of people going somewhere else, and our passage makes no difference to it; our history is entirely irrelevant to it).

Hopefully this page will always be a work in progress as I continue on my quest.

As a kid, travelling meant piling into the K-Car with a stack of books and my Etch-A-Sketch and making the two-day drive to my grandparents' cottage in Ignace, Ontario. Once a bustling railroad and mining town, Ignace suffered the same fate as many Northern Ontario towns, becoming a depressing whistle stop on the Trans-Canada highway. For many Canadians, the north, outdoors, and cottages have a particular place in the national psyche, but the vision is romanticized. To me, the north means the grim realities of feast-or-famine economies, buildings made from corrugated steel and chipboard, and giant freaking mosquitos. Later, as an adult, I tried a week-long camping and canoeing trip in Temagami. My in-laws adore the place, as their web page attests, but on that trip I realized as I was being eaten to death by bugs: I'm an unrepentant urbanite. I can shit in the woods with the best of them, but dammit, I prefer indoor plumbing and nice clean white sheets.

When I was a teenager, we decided like so many Canadians do to drive south for the March Break. This kicked off several years of road trips along the eastern seaboard of the US, as far south as the tip of Florida. I was fascinated with the change in culture and accents with only a few hours of driving. On a family trip when I was fifteen, I met my husband Chris on a mini-golf course in Edisto, South Carolina.

pictures and travelogues

My first European trip in late 1997 was to Italy. Eventually I'll get around to scanning the print ones that I have. For our honeymoon in fall 1998, Chris and I spent two weeks travelling through Scotland and Wales. The north coast of Scotland is absolutely unbelievable. In 2001, we hit London, Amsterdam, and Paris. All three cities were awesome, even though I spent much of Paris being sick with strep throat, which resulted in a freaky tripout in the Louvre while I was high on French cold meds, where I imagined the hordes of Japanese tourists were like blurry rivers streaming past my head, and the giant tapestries were talking to me.

These travels were before the days of digital cameras—well, at least my ownership of one—so there are travelogues of the first two trips, but no pics yet.

Arizona and Las Vegas  |   Vancouver and Victoria  |   London (trip #2)
San Francisco  |   Berlin  |   Barcelona  |   Ireland

I went to Winnipeg, Manitoba in June 2004 for a gathering of boring academics saying boring academic things to other boring academics. When I told people I was going to The Peg, they said things like, "Bring your mosquito repellent" and "Watch out for the glue sniffers." Oh yeah, it was magical. I really tried to give Winnipeg a chance. I hit every attraction I could find with great enthusiasm and optimism. I still couldn't figure out why anyone would voluntarily live there.

Other places I've traveled but can't even put together a decent travelogue or a few darn photos include extensive road trips along the east coast of Canada and the US (essentially from Florida to Cape Breton), Barbados, and Alberta (Calgary, Edmonton, Jasper, and Banff).