(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

It’s been quiet on the blog for the past couple of months. But, after 17 months of pandemic restrictions…we were finally able to travel! I had some tournaments in the Toronto area, followed by a couple more in Western Ontario, marking the first times that I had been more than one hour from Kingston since March 2020. So, what was it like?

In a word, “normal”. Yes, I had to wear a mask every time I went inside. And yes, I had to complete health declarations to compete in the tournaments. And many restaurants were still restricted to take-out only. But those restrictions seem almost normal too now.

The first trip was to a tournament in Burlington, followed by one the next day in East York. Booking the hotel was just like old times. However, I must admit that it was strange walking into a hotel again. Even though we are now being encouraged to “travel local”, there was still a lingering feeling of not having enough of a justification to be there. But being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 helped deal with that, and I soon forgot about it. As this first trip only took us away from home for two nights, we weren’t away for long enough to be totally disoriented.

After being home for a few days, it was time for the main trip to tournaments in Windsor and Woodstock. These were multi-day tournaments and took us about as far as we could go in southern Ontario without crossing a border. In fact, Windsor is so far from Kingston that we decided to stay overnight in Waterloo before making the final push on to Windsor.

Once in Waterloo, we visited a nearby village (St. Jacobs) that we had never seen before…yes, a completely discretionary trip! ! The next day, we took a break from our drive to have lunch in the town of Tilbury…again, no special reason to go, it just happened to be there. We picked up some food from the grocery store and ate it on the lawn of the local library.

We reached Windsor in the mid-afternoon. We wanted to get some practice in before the start of the tournament the next morning. It was brutally hot, but we rewarded ourselves with dinner at a Mexican restaurant called “Palenque”.

So far, so good. After dinner, we took a walk along the nearby Detroit River. The park was filled with unusual plant sculptures. But the “Wow” moment was across the river. Across the Detroit River from Windsor is the (larger) American city of Detroit…and seeing a city from another country (see photo at the very top of this post) seemed very surreal after the last 17 months. True, we couldn’t go across the border (the U.S. land border is still not open to non-essential travel, even though their COVID-19 infection rate is far higher than Canada’s), but it was a taste of what we hope to experience again before too long.

After a very brief period of adjustment, it wasn’t hard to get used to new things again. Stay tuned for more about our Western Ontario odyssey!