By Elliot

Please accept my apologies for not writing earlier. We weren’t that busy, but I lacked motivation and focus.

After a few lovely days in Christchurch, where (in true woolly wanderer form) we bought some local yarn, we headed back to Canada for Katie and Tom’s wedding.

Usually when we travel anywhere, we prioritize speed over smoothness and comfort. When you have a set number of days off you can take from work it makes sense to get to your destination as fast as possible so as to have more time to enjoy the destination. This time we travelled differently, given our lack of time off constraint. We broke up the journey by spending a day in Vancouver both on the way to and the way back from Toronto. We also spent a night in Auckland before travelling on to Queenstown on our way back. Even though the amount of total travel we did was a lot (7 flights in just over a week), we managed to have minimal travel fatigue. I don’t think we will always be able to travel this way, but it drove home that it’s nice to not be in a rush to get to the destination.

The two days that we spent in Toronto also drove home our homelessness. Without our own home, there is no place for us to stay without inconveniencing friends. We stayed in our friends’ guest bedroom both nights in Vancouver. But the guest bedroom is also their home office, so even though they are extremely gracious hosts, we were still in the way. When we meet new people in New Zealand and they ask us where we live, it’s become weirder to say Vancouver. We did live there and want to live there.

One last thing that was strange about being in Canada was the foreignness of being normal. We wore city clothes, went out with friends, dressed up for a wedding and generally behaved as normal people do when visiting another city for friends’ weddings. But spiritually, we still felt like we were in the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island. It was surreal.

Anyways, we are happy to be back in New Zealand and excited to continue our travels.