1. Revive your blog.
2. Tie up loose ends.
If you have a job (Melodie), go directly from your students’ graduation
ceremony to packing up your apartment to leaving town within 18 hours. If
you’re an unemployed bum (me), pack and clean like there’s no tomorrow. Donate
everything to the Salvation Army. Hide the stuff they didn’t want in the
apartment dumpsters (sorry). Stuff two cars to the absolute brim with about
half of the items you moved in with. Then sell the car. Downsizing is good.
3. Go to home # 1 to
see friends and family. In our case, we drove 6 hours from Kingston to
Quebec City, spent the night, and then drove the last 8 hours to Mel’s parents
in New Brunswick. Because of Mel’s job, we had less time than we wanted for
visiting at home, but work is a necessary evil. We enjoyed a family BBQ at
Mel’s parents’ house, visits with her Grampy, and a bonfire with friends.
4. Get inundated with
errands and paperwork. We had to do lots of little things that ate up a lot
of time. For example, I had to renew my license, we had to get a year’s worth
of our prescription allergy meds, and we had to take our cat for his final vet
visit. The final vet visit was important because, within 14 days of his travel,
we had to have some documents filled out by a vet and then have them certified
by a government vet. This turned out to be a stressful experience, because our
New Brunswick vet was unfamiliar with the paperwork and hesitant to fill it out
since he’d most recently lived in Ontario (she couldn’t verify that the area is
rabies-free, a key part of the paperwork). They called our Ontario vet, who
refused to fill out the paperwork because they hadn’t seen him since his
microchipping in April. On top of that, the local vet was hyper-paranoid
because his microchip wouldn’t scan and she couldn’t prove that our cat was
really who we said he was. We actually got sent to 4 vets over the course of 6
hours, but in the end we got it worked out: his microchip hadn’t scanned
because it was American, but the vet was able to verify his identity with the
chip company, and CFIA was able to verify that Ontario is rabies-free. So now,
hopefully, he’ll arrive the day after us. But there’s no guarantee: the weather
is so hot in Hong Kong that there’s been flight embargos on and off all summer.
We already miss our little guy!
5. Go to home #2 to
see family and friends. After 5 days in New Brunswick with Mel’s family, we
went to my parent’s house in Nova Scotia. En route, we stopped to see our
friend in Moncton, and Mel’s cousin in Halifax. My brother flew in that night,
so it was cool to have the whole family home at the same time. Over the next
few days, we went to Upper Clements Park (an amusement park), had dinner with
grammy and my aunt and uncle, hiked to Crystal Falls, had a bonfire at the
beach, and spent a day in Halifax.
6. Age. I turned
31 when I was home. I wonder if I’ll still be messing about in Asia when I’m
41?
7. Run out of time.
Our visit home was over so fast! On our last day, Me, Mel, my brother and all
of our parents met in Halifax for a last dinner of- what else?- Chinese food.
We all stayed at a hotel next to the airport since our flight (and my brother’s
flight) was so early, so we had some beers and swam and tried to relax. I was
feeling really tired that night, but as soon as I hit the bed my heart started
beating super fast and I began stressing. Mel has revealed that she cried (she
always has a travel cry). It was probably 1am before I got to sleep, and we
were up again by 5 to head to the airport.
8. Have a smooth
trip. I can’t complain at all about our trip. These flights are soooo long
(18 hours) and neither of us like to fly, but really, both legs of our flight were
smooth pretty much the whole way. We even lucked out with our bags- we’d
weighed them a dozen times, but at the airport one of them was underweight and
we were allowed to stuff it full of all the “maybe” items I’d had my mom bring
in with her. Then when a couple of other bags were slightly overweight the Air
Canada lady was totally cool about it. “Who cares?” she said. We’d been
stressing those bags! On our first trip to Korea, we’d been allowed two 70lb
bags. I distinctly remember packing a frying pan LOL!! Now you get one single
50lb bag. Downsizing sucks. And, sure, an 18 hour flight is boring, but we’d
been so busy lately we hadn’t been able to watch any of our favorite shows, so
I had a laptop full of good stuff for us to watch. And look, I’ve even killed
30 minutes typing up this blog :D
We’ll be landing in Hong Kong in another 3 ½ hours. We’re
almost there! After we go through customs and get our bags, we have
instructions to meet a driver with a KEDDY sign in front of *quote* “Burger’s
King”. Can’t wait to melt in the heat, see our apartment, and get some sleep!
China, here we come!
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