With all of the decisions there are to make in life having to make one concerning travel is usually not considered a major one. In this case though, it is.
Traveling is something I have always done, at least as an adult. While I did not travel that much as as a child (two family trips from LA to Montreal by car and two summers spent with ex-neighbors who had moved to Denver) the seed were sown early. My family liked to travel. My parents took a couple of trips to Europe and a trip to Hong Kong. My mother went with a neighbor to Mexico City. My two siblings, being older than I, traveled to Europe. My brother spent a year working in Antartica.
I didn't really begin my travels until I was in my mid-twenties. Ok, making the decision at 21 to move to Montreal from LA to attend university (knowing full well in the back of my mind that I was not moving back after) could be considered travel and I did make one two week trip to St Lucia in the Caribbean but my European (or non-North American if you prefer) adventures didn't start until 1984.
That is when I did the obligatory backpack, eurail six week odessey through most of Western Europe. This was followed by a two week trip in 1988 to attend a baroque music master class in Antwerp, Belgium (a good deal, all I had to pay was transportation to and from, the master class, lodging and food was picked up by the Belgium government to promote cultural exchange).
Then the fun began. In 1990 just as I finally finished the last nagging 3 credit course of my degree that had been festering there for a while I accepted a six month callout to Germany to work as a carpenter for an Air Defense unit. Well, this six month callout stretched to two years. I took full advantage of living in the heart of Europe to travel as much as I could. I had bought a 1972 VW beetle of one of the guys in the unit for about $450cdn and then proceeded to put on more than 32,000kms in about a year and a half. I went everywhere from Sweden to Morocco and from Holland to Turkey (obviously not all of that by VW). I've always said that the Canadian government paid for me to be on vacation in Europe for two years.
I returned from Germany in 1992 but that did not stop the traveling. The next summer (1993) I returned to Europe. The Lakeshore Concert Band was going to be playing in festivals in Spain and Holland and my sister and her family were going to spend three weeks traveling around Europe in a van and the two itineraries overlapped. So, taking advantage of the fact that the Canadian military had weekly flights to Germany from Ottawa, which I could get on for a little or no cost, over I went.
Again, in the summer of 1994, another opportunity to travel to Europe presented itself. My neighbor Margo had received an invitation to visit her friend Christiane in Cannes, France but didn't want to travel alone. She asked if I wanted to come along. Well, is the pope Polish? So, off we went in mid-August for a month. Christiane lent us her apartment just three blocks away from the beach and she stayed elsewhere. We spent one week exploring the towns and villages around Cannes and Nice, having lunch with another neighbor's mother who lived in the hills above Nice. We then rented a car for a week and went up though the Gorge du Verdon over to the hills of Provence , on to Aix-en-Provence, Aubagne, along the coast to St Tropez and back to Cannes. We camped the whole time. After another couple of days we went by ferry over to Corsica and spent a week camping and traveling in a circuitous route around the island. The last few days were again spent with Germaine (the other neighbor's mother) and a visit to Monaco before returning home.
Now, sometime around 1995 or 1996 I tagged along with the volunteer band at Trenton, along with several ex-Rube Band members, to Germany for the official closing ceremonies of the base at Baden. Yeah, another inexpensive trip. I was there about a week and a half.
That was it for European travel for a while but not neccessarily the end of travel. Starting in the summer of 1997 were three consecutive years of appearing in the military tattoo in Halifax with three different groups. In 1997 it was a trip with our band. Actually it was an Air Force composite band made up of members of our band (438 Squadron Band in St Hubert) and Air Force volunteer bands from various bases across Canada. In 1998 I was "loaned" out (along with 6 other members of my band) to work with the National Naval Reserve Band for the summer. We also went to Halifax but after that we did a "mid-west" tour from Thunder Bay to Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and back to Quebec City.
In 1999 a bunch of us were loaned out to the Central Band in Ottawa to augment their ranks for celebration around the 75th anniversary of the Canadian Air Force. This saw us again go to Halifax but then just travel around Ontario and Quebec for shows and such. We (the members from my band) also made a detour on our way to Halifax to do a small tattoo with the rest of our band at the piping college in Summerside, PEI.
The next year (2000) I started a full time course for Web Technology and missed out on a second summer of working with the Central Band. The course was a year long intensive course and included a stage in industry. I ended up being hired by the company I did my stage with but wanted a short break before actually starting.
My friends Bev and Fraser, whom I met while in Germany and had visited with often while they lived in Trenton and once while they were in Winnipeg, had just moved to England. Fraser had taken his release from the military. They had enjoyed living overseas so much they decided to give that a try so over they went along with their two daughters. They had been there now for 6 months and were bugging me to come over. Knowing I had a job waiting for me I bought a ticket (credit card, of course) and off I went. I usually have more money in my pocket for a weekend trip to Ottawa than I had on that trip but Bev and Fraser were so happy that I was coming over (along with an extra suitcase of Canadian goodies they couldn't buy in England) that they had no problems with me sponging off them for 10 days.
This trip was followed by two more trips to England to tag along on vacations with them. Christmas of 2001 was spent in Spain. They arranged for two weeks of timeshare condos in Southern Spain. The day after I arrived in London we took off for Malaga. Christmas day was actually spent in Morocco. In 2002 I was supposed to go over in September but the charter airline I booked my flight with went bankrupt (only took a year but I got my money back). In Novemeber 2002 my friends and I went to Edmonton for the Grey Cup game and saw the Alouettes win. In 2003 the Lakeshore Concert Band did a mini-tour going to PEI and Nava Scotia for two weeks. In 2004 I returned to England where I went to Dublin for 4 days over Easter and then went along on Bev and Fraser's trip to the Canary Islands.
That's been it except for a trip to Austin, Texas for SXSW in March of this year. So, what is my big decision? Tune in tomorrow (or a day or two later) for the part two of this saga.