Arriving Before You Leave

We arrived at Toronto Airport at 6am on Saturday morning, all the time zone changes were starting to cause havoc with our equilibrium and sanity by this point. Leaving NZ at 11pm on Friday the 18th of February to arrive in Vancouver at 3pm on Friday the 18th of February was trippy and screwed with our senses, we were literally time travellers!

Technically we arrived in Canada before we left NZ …. Mind blown into a million pieces.

To say that we were travel weary by the time we arrived would be an understatement indeed, we had been travelling physically on a plane for 19 hours by that point, add a 7 hour stopover in Vancouver to the mix it was no wonder we were incapable of any intelligible thought or conversation (What is our excuse for all our other moronic things we have said or done I hear you say!).

Whilst there was no beautiful marine wildlife to greet us at Toronto Airport the view did not disappoint! We had landed in a blustery and wintry landscape, finally we could see the snow we had longed for. One of the things that we were looking forward to the most about being in Canada at this time of year was that it gave us the opportunity to dip our toes in the freezing waters of a Canadian winter.

We would be getting the best of both worlds (or seasons might be more apt) a chance to experience the snow for a couple of months before it disappeared to make room for spring.

It was not until we moved to NZ that we genuinely appreciated how much we would miss the seasons, the North Island in NZ only had two seasons the wet and the not so wet, the wet brought a cold dampness with it that seeped into your bones, dripped down your windows and left black furry mold growing on the walls.

I am sure that there will be some of you who think we are crazy for swapping the subtropical climate of NZ for Canada (in fact there are many Canadians who have asked us if we are crazy for moving to Canada from NZ) but with childlike joy we were excited to see everything burst into life in spring, to get bitten to death by all the annoying bitey things we had read about in the summer ( I will regret those words later), to see the leaves of the trees aflame with the colours of fall and wonder at the feather light tingle of snowflakes melting on our tongues in winter.

We wanted full immersion into everything Canada (okay, maybe not the ridiculous insurance, phone networks and the bureaucracy but more on that in posts to come).

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.  

We had one last flight to go which was to Ottawa, and whilst we were soaking up the travelling experience and looking at everything with fresh eyes (okay, that is an outright lie, our eyes were like two bloodshot piss holes in the snow by then) we were in desperate need of a comfortable bed and a long nap!

All I could say is thank goodness for flight information boards, if it had told us our flight was to the moon, was leaving from Stargate 1, and Captain Kirk was flying the plane we would have followed without question such was our faith in its far superior knowledge and our total lack of cognizant thought at that time.

The Wizard of Oz AKA the flight information board told us we had less than an hour to wait which was just enough time to grab a snack and a cuppa in the transit lounge.

The flight from Toronto to Ottawa took an hour and before we knew it, we were off the plane and heading to baggage collection, our bags were one of the first off and after a short walk to clear Customs we were at the airport doors looking for the taxi rank sign.

Our experiences trying to leave NZ compared to arriving in Canada were a dichotomy, we had gone from feeling like doors were constantly being slammed in our face to feeling like there were no doors, nothing was holding us back and every part of the process after landing in Canada was easy, it was the freest we had felt for a long time.

At just after 9am on Saturday the 19th of February we stepped out of the Ottawa Airport revolving door and straight into the stuff of our dreams, snow was everywhere! The brightness of the snow made our eyes sting, and the freezing wind made our noses run and cheeks turn red, but we were genuinely deep down in our souls happy.

The thirty-minute taxi ride from the airport to our Air BnB in Nepean was a white-knuckle ride, winter driving in Canada is where lanes are made up, stop signs are optional and the ditches at the side of the highway become a carpark!

After twenty-eight hours of travelling, airports in three Canadian cities, two time zones, three Covid tests and one taxi ride we had finally made it.

We arrived at what would be our home for the next month utterly exhausted but elated. Our Air BnB host had made sure that the apartment was warm and comfortable and whilst we would have loved to just crawl into bed and sleep for a year there was no milk, and a hot cup of tea was in order, our flights had left us so dehydrated we felt like Gandhi’s flip flop.

We headed out into the snow (any old excuse) and returned with some staples for the next couple of days, cans of Heinz tomato soup, bread, milk, snickers bars and Tetley tea bags, not entirely nutritional and more fitting for student life but still delicious, cheap, and filled a hole.

There would be time later to experience the culinary delights of Canada, at that moment the need for sleep far outweighed our excitement to explore. Our bed was not calling, it was screaming at the top of its lungs!