It sounds awfully flowery and definitely all pseudo-intellectual, but we spent last night chasing the sunset across Canada. Leaving Ottawa at around 6.15 in the evening aboard an impossibly smooth Boeing 787 Dreamliner, 40,000 feet above places with wonderful names like Medicine Hat, Vulcan and Maple Creek, we were fighting a losing battle with the light. But it was fun while it lasted. By the time we started to descend through the hills, valleys and occasional snow-topped mountains around Vancouver, the light all came from the sprawling city below.
It’s from above, on an internal flight that took nearly four-and-a-half hours, that you realise the sheer vastness of the country. And for much of it, there is nothing bar a beautiful wilderness. Occasionally, a big, winding river comes into sight but more often that not there’s sheer emptiness. Six miles high, it’s like being in another world.
From the gentle sway of Ottawa, the city that always sleeps, we are now in Vancouver, a vast, sprawling metropolis. The quiet, gentle visits to parks, an arboretum, the epic Canadian parliament buildings, the great Ottawa river replaced by the more familiar hustle and bustle of city life.
The time differences have been interesting. Our arrival day in Ottawa was five hours longer and we have lost a further three hours in Vancouver. Returning to the UK after previous visits to Canada has left me with varying amounts of jet lag, lasting days. Next week, when we fly back, at 7.45 pm in the evening, an eight to nine hour flight will see us landing not early in the morning but early in the afternoon.
Last night’s Air Canada flight was memorable not just for the amazing Dreamliner plane, but the terrible on board catering. For a mere fifty dollars, we were ‘treated’ to to mini microwaved burgers, which made the Asda Feasters brand taste like haute cuisine, and some kind of vegan wrap, with varying types of cardboard flavouring, along with two small glasses of admittedly agreeable red wine. It was that or nothing and I have to say that post meal, nothing would have been the better choice.
We have nothing planned for Vancouver but my Canadian family has everything planned. Sailing, a comedy night in Stanley Park, Grouse Mountain, Virgin River and a night on the lash before it all comes to an end.
Forgive me for not sharing too much of this on social media. While I enjoy sites like Facebook, as do most people of a certain vintage, and I depend on it to a significant extent with plugging this blog, I find it a little tiresome and tiring these days. I am all for people sharing their life experiences on social media, and indeed living their whole lives on it – and I am guilty of that, m’lud – I have so much else I need to do before the Grim Reaper comes knocking, so you are far more likely to read about my boring little world on here.
Contrary to the popular perception that my partner and I have nothing in common and share nothing, I can report that she has generously passed on the cold she acquired almost certainly on the original flight from London to Ottawa. At least I hope it’s just a cold and not the return of the virus that stopped the world from 2020. But how would I know? No one much tests anymore and I’m free to do what I please and go where I want. And what better place to spread viruses than an aircraft where the same air is constantly recycled? If you hear a news bulletin where you discover hundreds of people have fallen sick after taking an internal flight in Canada, you know who to blame.
Finally, given that most of the millions who follow this blog (is this right? – ed) live in the UK, I’m sure you are wondering what the weather is like. Well, it’s been beautiful apart from the night we landed in Ottawa and our last night in Ottawa when, as we weather forecasters say, it pissed down.
Anyway, I have to go now. The stretch limo is arriving soon to take us to our sailing trip on one of my brother’s sail boats. It’s a hard life but someone’s got to live it.
