North America 2022 : Day 0 Preparations and Planning

Two suitcases, two carry-on bags, a hat, coats, and handbag. That should do it. Pity we have to go to all the trouble of packing as well.

But that’s the almost-final activity before we head off. Way, way, way back was the planning.

Our last trip overseas, of any consequence, was our European jaunt during 2019 – Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and France. We had plenty of plans for further trips in the years to follow: Myanmar (shelved due to their internal politics), New Zealand (cancelled due to COVID, twice), and Turkey and Greece and southern Europe all in one trip (also shelved due to COVID). So in early 2021 we were starting to get a bit twitchy about travelling, wondering if the possibilities were ever going to be as they were before. And then, thankfully, the COVID vaccines appeared, we were jabbed twice in that year and things started to looked a little more rosy.

But where to travel?

When we started to think about it a lot of countries in the world were lagging way behind in terms of their vaccination uptakes. There were plenty of reasons for that, including, but not limited to, the greed of the West in grabbing as many vaccine doses as they could as quickly as possible, thereby freezing out the little guys.

Whatever the reason the fact remained that there were a lot of places we didn’t feel entirely comfortable visiting. It seemed to be a choice of Western countries where vaccination rates were high, medical facilities were good, and where we hadn’t been before. And there weren’t a lot of those.

Luckily Canada seemed to fit all of those criteria. It was a country we’d always wanted to get to but had never seemed to be able to fit in. And we had friends in Montreal and Calgary we could visit. It seemed like good idea at the right time.

Added to that, for me, was the bonus of the World Science Fiction Convention being held in Chicago in early September. Surely we could fit that in as well. Maybe fly directly there, stay in Chicago for a week and then move on. Yeah, why not?

That was the start.

So, where to after that?

It happens that I was searching for my name on Google one day, as you do, and discovered the small town of Middlemiss in Ontario in Canada. A bit out of the way, about halfway between Windsor and Niagara Falls. So why don’t we enter Canada at Windsor, pick up a car and drive to the Falls, a place we had already decided was on our itinerary. A great idea, until we hit the stumbling block of working out how to get from Detroit in the US to Windsor, across the river in Canada. The Canadian Government seemed set on preventing day-trippers from the US visiting and had stopped the normal bus service between the two cities. Taxi? Couldn’t figure out how that would work. Where would they drop us? What were the Canadian COVID entry requirements? And how would they impact us? It was too far to walk, and we didn’t know anyone who could drive us across. It was a bust. Maybe we could have done it if we hadn’t needed to have a number of other things set up to follow, such as the car hire. A search on rentals out of Windsor found very few available and those we did find were hideously expensive; not so much for the daily rate but more due to the drop-off fee as we weren’t going to be returning the car to our starting point.

Try as we might we couldn’t get the planning to fit so we had to drop the idea of visiting the small township of Middlemiss. A pity, but travel these days is a combination of a lot of “nearlys”, “almosts” and “forget-about-its”. There wasn’t any point in railing against them. We just had to accept the situation and move on.

Just about everything in our planning after that slotted into place. At lunch with some friends in early May I had joked that it might be a good idea for me to catch COVID before I went on this trip. “Don’t even think about it,” was the reply. So I didn’t, until Robyn and I tested positive for the disease in early June. Then I thought about little else.

Luckily it was a mild case and we came out of it with no long-term effects. By then we’d been triple-vaxed, and we found, after seeing my doctor, that we would be able to get a fourth vaccination prior to leaving Australia at the end of August. With that jab accomplished we figured we’d lucked into about the best protection we could hope for.

It soon became obvious to us that the trip we were planning was going to be a long one. The week in Chicago at the start was settled, and then we had the plan to take a cruise up the Inside Passage (surely Canada can find a better name for it than that) from Vancouver up to Alaska and back. We wanted the cruise at the end of our trip so that would define the time we had available for the rest of Canada. Searches, checks and trial bookings got us to decide on a cruise leaving Vancouver at the beginning of October. Even a week earlier was just too early.

Which gave us four weeks in Canada, between the end of the convention and getting on the boat. Six weeks in total. A long haul. Thankfully Canada is a big place with a lot to see. We doubt whether we will ever get the chance to go back, which meant we had to make the most of it.

How did we fare? The next six weeks will tell.