It’s the time of year when everyone (in Canada, anyway) talks about heading south for a vacation, going to Florida or Mexico or Cuba or Jamaica or wherever. I never got this. Our family didn’t take vacations to tropical places — partly because our vacations rarely strayed outside the province, and partly because all five of us burn like dry paper — but I never felt robbed by this. I simply don’t get the appeal of going to a foreign country just to lie on a beach like driftwood. Or, worse yet, dance to endless Bob Marley songs as part of some ungodly resort activities agenda. My one trip to the Caribbean — to Barbados for a friend’s wedding — was quite enough, and would’ve been unbearable except for the fact that more than a dozen friends and family came along for the trip. Our friend also took the time to arrange some off-resort activities for us and held the wedding at another location, otherwise I’d have gone stir-crazy. Had it not been her wedding I would never have gone on such a vacation; now that I’ve done so, I’ve no desire to ever go on another.

I am, however, very much looking forward to this fall’s trip through the Rockies. I’d love to visit Switzerland, Germany, France, northern Italy, more of Austria, more of Scotland, Dubrovnik, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, San Francisco, the interior of BC…and on and on. Granted, there’s nothing terribly exotic on that list, but I’m still fairly new to world travel, so I’m building up to it.

At any given time there’s only a few days worth of food in our kitchen. Living where we live, right in the middle of the city with access to several grocery stores and specialty food shops, we can basically keep a minimum of food on hand and just pick up what we want on the day when we think we’ll need it. We live JIT, I guess. I’m never sure if we’re not grown up enough to have a full kitchen, or if we’re just tremendously efficient. 🙂

It’s a pretty big shift from how I grew up, where we’d buy a truckload of groceries every couple of weeks because we lived about 35 km from a decent grocery store.