We
can always travel back...
Travel
will come back. Honest. Can’t really say in what form it’s all
going to take, nor when, but it will come back. Far too many
economies of most nations depend on a significant amount of travel to
keep things ticking over.
We
can’t get a handle on it at the moment, nor probably won’t for
quite some time to come. With people from both Canada and the U.S.
unable to fly to any of the destinations we like without having to
self-quarantine at either end, it’s all rather difficult to say
except that it will.
But
for now…
...went
into Abbotsford on a recent weekend (something to do) and visited a
wine shop. Reading all the labels and from all the countries we have
toured set us off on a ‘nostalgia tour remembering, for example,
when we were in Croatia with a good gang who often toured with us.
This particular bunch loved to sit around the dinner table with a
good bottle of wine, or possibly more, and chat.
One
evening, they chatted so much the hotel ran out of wine. Not every
bottle, just their particular red. Memorable.
We
remembered evenings on the occasional free day when Bev and I would
‘smuggle’ dinner into our hotel. This worked especially well when
in France where it is so easy to find delicious and exotic little
snacks. We’d visit either the grocery or some specialty shop, then
drop into a wine shop (easy to find in France), buy a bottle we could
afford making sure we had a corkscrew or It was a screw top (not
always easy to find in France in those days), then up to our room and
if in our many visits to Nice, out to our hotel balcony overlooking
the Med.
The
smuggling process is an art form. Since we didn’t want the smaller
hotels to think we didn’t like their cuisine, (do not annoy the
French when it comes to food!) we hid things. Like a baguette down my
jacket sleeve, a bottle of wine in Bev’s old red purse (along with
olives and including the main course), cutlery and other wee bits
and pieces. And a brush to make sure there were no crumbs lying about
in evidence.
Call
on the memories...
All
of us should (and probably do), open up our special little memory box
while waiting for the world, albeit a new world, to open up for us
again.
We
remember Bev getting up on a moving day morning in the warm and
beautiful Loire Valley, looking out the window and saying, “What’s
white and falls out of the sky in May?” Snow! Cold, wet, miserable
snow. Which was bad enough but even more annoying when we discovered
our coach had no heater. Mind you, it could have been more memorable
had we followed through on the idea of one our guests who suggested
we could take all those head rest things on the back of seats and
have a bonfire in the aisle.
Equally
memorable was the year we were driving from Edinburgh to Inverness on
our Christmas in Durham, Hogmanay in Inverness tour. It was the
heaviest snow fall in over a century. Even the sheep looked confused.
And cold. This coach did have heat but it couldn’t keep up
defrosting the windows. Bev spent most of the travel time going up
and down the aisle using her credit cards to scrape the windows so
our guests could see all that history being made.
And
can anyone who was with us on our Turkey journeys ever forget those
countless
Alladin
like sights and those
unbelievable cave hotels in Cappadocia? Or the magical medieval
Jemaa el-Fna outdoor
market at
Marrakech
in Morocco,
a stunning throw back to an ancient world with snake charmers,
dancers up from Mali, drummers,
fortune tellers, traders in
everything.
The
square at Avignon
As
some of us sat having lunch in the huge square in front of the 14th
century Palais des Papes in Avignon a shaven headed, rough looking
guy, about 30, walked into the middle of the
square set down the chair he was carrying, rolled up his sleeves
revealing a couple of mean looking tattoos, sat down and began to
sing.
His
clear, powerful tenor voice carried around the square. Not French but
Medieval Occitan, the old language of the South of France. A
haunting, echoing richness that sang of things we knew nothing about
but which entered our souls.
People
who had been crossing the square moved to the sides, those of us who
had been moaning about the heat, or whatever, grew silent leaving the
huge centre of the square to this rough looking character who simply
sat on his chair filling the air - and our souls with a language of
what had once been. Leaving us at that moment, and as I am now, close
to tears.
He
finished, folded up his chair, and left.
And
for a heart stirring finalé…
That
magic moment just after dusk when the massed pipes and drums come
marching through the gates of Edinburgh Castle hundreds strong at the
world famous Edinburgh Military Tattoo. As Bev puts it, “It’s a
box of kleenex night”.
All
of us have special memories. Maybe we’ve tucked some of them into
corners of our minds, but they are there and maybe at times like
we’re all going through, it’s time to bring them out with all the
good feelings that go with them.