Home .... for now

On our last afternoon in Canada we took the ferry back to the mainland. This time we could see the surroundings. It is a beautiful trip in its own right especially with the sea as smooth as a mirror. It takes about 1.5 hours past wooded islands, gliding anti-climactically into a rather grotty harbour.

After the turmoil of US security, Vancouver is about as security conscious as Bristol Bus Station. I think they may be making a point to their big brother. We set off on another tedious flight, our last for sometime hopefully. I watched "Terminator 3 - This time it's impersonally boring" while Eleanor, always the intellectual, chose "Bridget Jones - Beyond The Edge of Boredom". Looking out the window we saw alternately clouds and snow. Sometimes you couldn't tell which was which. We wore our BA socks, wrapped our BA blankets around us, covered our eyes with BA masks and waited for it all to end.

Which eventually it did, and now we are home - for a few days at least.

I hope you've enjoyed the blog, quite a lot of people have said they did (sorry the method for posting comments is so obscure). I won't be blogging in France or Italy - you can go there as easily as I can and you can see it for yourself. I've enjoyed writing a blog: it helps you frame your thoughts about what you are experiencing. Adding the pictures is the hard bit (thanks to Jim Gilligan for early advice). A picture is not only worth a thousand words, it takes as long to add to a blog as the words do to write. I suppose I can add to my CV, "Familiar with Paint, IrvanView, AC View, Adobe Paintshop, Impact and 20 other image editors, but only to reduce JPEG file sizes".

Several people have asked, "What do you remember most about the holiday?". Well, Australia, New Zealand and Vancouver Island are all beautiful in their own ways. Glaciers, mountains, islands, waterfalls, the Pacific Ocean, whales, dolphins, sealions, bald eagles ... all that stuff is fantastic but the bits we remember most are where we stopped for a few days and experienced how people live.

One explaination for why people read novels is that in them we encounter people we can identify with or recognise from our own lives. They have experiences which are similar to those we, or people we know, might have or have had. They show us, in fact, that life is everywhere similar because we face similar issues but different because people deal with it in different ways.

The most enjoyable parts of the holiday, for both of us, have being seeing how life can be different, and since the people we met are like us, that we could change our lives as well. Maybe we won't ever live on Waiheke or Vancouver Island, in Russell or Sydney but we could ... and maybe we will.

One group of people we met deserve a special mention. Judith, Ultan, Aislinn, Peter (and Sally, though she wasn't there!), Rosie, Colin, Jane and Mark, thank you all for your hospitality and for answering all our silly tourist questions!

Now, I must finish packing the van. Ferera, Bologna, Ravenna and Fiorenze are waiting. If you want to keep in touch we will be checking our emails.