Archive for June, 2021


Going, going…

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June 23, 2021

It’s 10:30pm, and in about seven hours I’ll embark on my revenge vacation. Thirty-seven days, seven cities, and hopefully enough memories to put a dent into the sum total of missed experiences over these past 15 months. The trip will start in Vancouver, followed by Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles (well, Huntington Beach, to be precise), Reno, Vegas, and New York. At the very end, I’ll take a ceremonial walk across the border from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. (When I was booking the trip in May, the border situation was very uncertain. It’s still a bit murky.)

Some of my best-laid plans have already gone sideways. Three AirBnB hosts in a row cancelled my reservations as soon as I booked them, followed by a mad scramble to re-book. Amtrak has confessed that they did not in fact know if the border would reopen when they sold me a suspiciously cheap ticket to a crossborder bus. (Guess who’s got two thumbs, paid $300 extra for a last-minute Vancouver/Seattle flight, and will never ride with Amtrak again? This guy!) Air Canada unilaterally changed my Toronto/Vancouver flight to an earlier time, which means I’ll have to head out before 6am instead of sleeping in a little. (I won’t lie, I’m tempted to just head to the airport right now and spend the night there to make sure I don’t accidentally sleep through.)

So, yeah, life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ On top of that, for the first time in my life I bought international traveler insurance. Judging by their dual classification of “just abroad” and “the US of A,” they probably charged me extra due to all the fun gun shenanigans the US is so infamous for. Oh well. Given the sheer randomness of all the public shootings in that fallen state (still no January 6 commission, almost six months later), I guess I’ll just have to hit the ground every time I hear a bang. Maybe slather some ketchup on myself for good measure – you know, to boost those odds. (If I do, in fact, get shot while I’m in the States… Come on, this was funny, though.)

Ontario tentatively started to reopen 10 days or so ago. It felt like a bizarrely perverse experience, eating a fairly bland (and oversalted) burger with fries and beer while other people did the same all around me, unmasked though distanced. I’ve gone out a few more times (you know, for science) and the sensation is still there, though it’s getting better. Even for someone with my wanderlust, this is one helluva long trip – the longest I’ve ever traveled, actually. I figure this sort of shock therapy is just what I need: people, museums, busy sidewalks, new sights and old friends every day… Every trip and every experience changes us, if only just a little. I know I’ll be a very different person when I return (hopefully without any new scars!) – I’m curious to learn just what those changes will be.

I’m going to hit up almost all of my old haunts, though I never lived in Portland or Los Angeles – and I’m skipping Dallas and Tampa because, you know, the plague. Southern states are the least likely to be vaccinated at this point in time. Nevada, being a very purple sort of state, is as low as Texas, with only 40% being fully vaccinated… Guess I’ll just have to dodge everyone who coughs, eh?

In a way, this will be a trip back in time, visiting all the old places I’ve lived in, all the friends and classmates I haven’t seen in years – and seeing my US family for the first time in over two years. (Or even as long as four years for some.) Just to preserve these memories, I’m taking my DSLR with its obnoxiously large zoom lens – next time I visit the US, the trip will be much less ambitious, so gotta make those memories count.

And meanwhile, I’m stuffing my shiny new 40-liter Osprey backpack with everything I can think of. (Can’t forget my laptop! Heh.) The backpack cost me a pretty penny, but I can see what all the noise is about: I keep finding more and more features and hidden compartments. That right there is as close as one can get to a Bag of Holding in real life.

And so… A few hours of sleep. A quick shower and breakfast. (I’ve tactically set aside a Tim Hortons cinnamon bun to reward myself for getting up before sunrise.) A trip to the airport before the city begins to wake up. A westward and cross-continental flight in defiance of all those pesky time zones. (In a way, it’ll take only an hour and 46 minutes. Heh.) The one revenge vacation to end them all…

Wish me luck, eh?

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Pedestrian once more

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June 22, 2021

It’s been 39 days since I left my job, and I’ve finally sold my car. It was an inevitability: at some point, you either get rid of your car or it gets destroyed in a wreck. Or it outlives you, I suppose, but that’s a bit too grim.

After leaving my job, there was no longer any reason to drive. Living in southern Toronto, in the densely populated Annex neighbourhood, everything is within walking distance. I had to actually drive to the grocery store half a mile away just to make sure the battery didn’t die from atrophy. One of peculiar things about Canada is that they’re not very flexible on car insurance: you must purchase the full liability coverage, and as an immigrant, there’s the added surcharge. In the end, my car insurance ended up being $230 CAD a month, and that’s after all the discounts I’ve managed to stack up. Add the monthly parking fee on top of that, and it’s close to $400 a month, which is a lot to pay for a glorified paperweight.

Thinking strategically, there’s only one time I’ll absolutely need a car in the next year or so, and that’ll be for my upcoming move to Quebec. (I have my heart set on Quebec City…) Even then, I’d need to get a Uhaul to move all my stuff, so once again, a car would be a liability. (Not to mention paying extra for the registration in Quebec, etc.)

I’ve had that little Kia Rio since 2013, but it was time to say goodbye. After 61,777 miles, after more roadtrips than I care to recall, we parted ways. Of course, things didn’t quite go smoothly: an overly enthusiastic car wash guy slathered absolutely everything in shampoo, flooded the car’s electronics, disabled the fuel gauge, a couple of small buttons, and half the wiper functions – and ultimately cost me about $450 in repairs and discounts. Ho hum. In the end, the car I’d bought for $24,000 USD in Vegas ended up getting sold for $3,750 CAD in Toronto: that’s an 87.4% drop in value. The purchase price is a bit high because I was an idiot and fell for every single sales trick. Yes, they actually managed to sell me anti-rain windshield treatment in the middle of the desert. (Hey, I never claimed to be wise.) Still, that investment gave me some much-needed peace of mind, since my previous three cars had been lemons that were liable to break down at least every other month. When you’re a warehouse grunt, and when missing a workday not only costs a day’s wages but potentially jeopardizes your job security… In that context, a monthly payment of ~$360 is a whole lot cheaper than spending the same amount of money on repairs. Ahh, youth.

It’s strange, adjusting to the new carless mindset. Earlier today, as I finalized the transaction with an enthusiastic guy (who also happened to be a double immigrant like myself), there was a choice of taking a 40-minute Lyft or a 1-hour-40-minute bus trip home. One of those options was literally 10 times more expensive than the other. I think you know which one I picked. Some panicky part of my brain keeps pointing out all the car-accessible places I can’t easily go to (like the town where they shot Schitt’s Creek) but even then, arranging a ride would be a whole lot easier and cheaper than maintaining a car I don’t really use. My life is simpler now, which is exactly what I’d been working toward. In many ways, I’m drifting back to the pre-Amazon version of myself, right out of college. Replacing cider with coke, reverting from being a driver to being a pedestrian.

There is a symmetry to this: the only reason I ever got a car in the first place (and learned to drive over the course of one weekend) was because of my Amazon job. That warehouse was the only place hiring in Reno during the mean, lean winter of 2009, and it was 35 miles away. There was no transit, and eventually I ran out of carpool buddies. I needed that job, so a $1,200 lemon car was the only way to go. Now that my 11.5-year journey with the company is over, so is my need for a car. It all folds in on itself, eh?

The only objective downside is that I won’t be able to get away at top speed if there’s ever a legitimate but improbably rare emergency, such as a global pandemic or a radioactive leak at the local nuclear power plant – but come on, those things only happen once a century or so. (If the Pickering Nuclear Plant goes kaboom right after I post this… Come on, it was funny, though.) Without my car, xgf and I never would’ve been able to run off on our 72-day-long AirBnB odyssey. Still, even the prospect of a mildly apocalyptic romantic adventure isn’t enough to maintain that dead weight.

This will take some getting used to… Even as my mobility is reduced, my life is so much simpler now. What I gave up in my freedom of movement, I’ve offset by making my bank account happier and my life a bit less stressful. No longer shall I have to be that jerk neighbour who drives to the grocery store a few blocks away – and if that’s not a clear-cut benefit, I don’t know what is. I hope my car leads a long and happy life before heading off to the big Kia parking lot in the sky, eh.

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