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Road Blog #5

We’re here. And so is Pat — she flew in a couple of days ago and stayed with friends.

Everything is in Kristina’s appartment, the rental truck is returned and I’m beat.

K’s out on her balcony looking at the CN Tower. Her location is amazing, walking distane from the University of Toronto and so much more — China Town, Younge Street, you name it.

What’s weird is, now that the road trip is over, a new era has begun for me. I’m now a visitor at her home. After 22 years, that’s a major mind bender.

There are great pics just waiting to be posted, but they’re gonna have to wait. First off, we’re not sure where the camera is. Second, like i said to begin with, we’re beat. So, tomorrow we’re going to post the final pictures of our road trip and the move in.

Oh, no editor for this, and i can’t see straight, so spelling may be especially bad.

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Road Blog #3

We were road warriors today — about 14 hours on the road.

That included stops for snaps at Kakabeka Falls (see K’s pic below), for grub in Marathon and a near sunset shoot at a scenic spot on Lake Superior. There were a couple of stops on the big lake. One of which included me singing a rendition of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Not quite up to Gordon Lightfoot’s standard, but not bad if I do say so.

Coffee, Redbull and a combo of Van Halen 1, Led Zeppelin 4 and lots of other great numbers got us through. But the caffeine is wearing off. Gotta crash.

Don’t you crash before looking at these great pics from Kristina:

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Road Blog#2

The Canadian Shield rocks!

Kristina and I just chowed down in Ignace, ON. We drove 10 hours today to get here, starting in Shoal Lake, MB. We bedded down there instead of making it to Winnipeg.

Skies were looking kinda foreboding. It was getting dark. And there had been construction making it tough to tell where the road ended and the gravel began.

Turns out that was a good thing. Shortly after checking into our motel, it really started to pour and there was booming thunder and sky-piercing lightening. Then tornado warnings started showing up on the TV. Including for where we were.

Yikes.

We finally got to sleep around mindnight but were woken by another round of thunder and lightening.

The morning news told us that we missed a tornado that touched down by just an hour’s drive.

Yikes.

Today, after lunch in Steinbach, MB, we drove through the amazing lakes of southeastern Manitoba and through the Canadian Shield. I’ve never seen this country face to face before. Amazing. Unreal. I can’t believe I waited this long to make the drive.

I can’t get over how amazing the Manitoba lakes and the shield are. The Shield? It’s as awe inspiring as the Rocky Mountains in its way. Pretty high comment from me, being an Alberta boy raised within eyeshot of the Rockies.

We’ll be up early tomorrow to drive another 12 or so hours. More pics then.

Kristina has more unreal shots. Take a look..

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Road Blog #1

Kristina and I hit the road at 8:35 this morning from Sherwood Park, AB. Thirteen hours have passed and we’re in Shoal Lake Manitoba, at the Shoal Lake Motor Inn.

We could’ve kept going, but road construction and a coming thunderstorm forced us to stop.

We had a quick pit stop in the Alberta-Saskatchewan border town of Lloydminster. Gassed up again just east of Saskatoon in beautiful Colonsay, finally stopping for some grub and a Pil at Brown’s Social House in Yorkton, near the Manitoba boarder.

It was beautiful prairie driving through foreboding skies and some rain. Sometimes lots of rain. But when we hit Manitoba, the skies were clear so we soldiered on. Then it got dark. And the road construction erased the road markings. And clear sky gave way to clouds and lightening.

So, we’re taking a powder in Shoal and will hit the road again bright and early Tuesday AM.

Take a look at some of K’s pics.

Colonsay, SK
Colonsay, SK

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Blogging volcanoes and crickets

It’s been a few months of blogging now and it’s starting to make me feel like an insecure kid in my early 20s. Again.

Maybe you know what that’s like? If not, I’ll fill you in.

There are some weeks where you feel like a million bucks. The “beautiful” people have all the time in the world for you. No matter what you say, they’re digging it. At work or school you’re a rock star. You can do no wrong, your ideas are brilliant, your execution flawless. Folks tear up laughing at your jokes. No wrong can be done by you.

Then there are the other days where you could swear you bathed in garlic and that your brain and mouth are horribly out of sync. You can do no right.

This is how it feels with the blog. Some weeks I hit ‘publish’ and the readers flow like lava from a volcano. I’m on fire. The reader numbers tick away faster than I can count ‘em.

Other weeks, it’s crickets. The reader numbers seem to be going in reverse.

What did I do wrong? Why don’t they like me anymore? Why? Why!?

That’s part of the reason why I haven’t hit ‘publish’ for a while on a new blog. There are two other reasons, though.

First is that my bride, Patricia has had a new hurdle thrown at her on her health battle. We’d thought she was on a steady road to recovery when she got a sucker punch. Now she’s facing a few more tough rounds in her fight. She’s gonna win, but damn.

It really pisses me off and I’ve let it mute my words for a while.

The second thing is that my oldest daughter, Kristina, is heading to Toronto for school. It’s unbelievable that the little bundle we brought home from the hospital in what seems like not that long ago is going to be working on a post grad program in the Big Smoke.

What a mix of joy, sadness, excitement and fear. There’s no reason for fear — it’s going to be amazing for her — but she’s lived with me and Patricia all of her life an now…

…Sorry, I needed a moment there, I’m verklemmt!

As I write this, it’s our last day living together as the family that became complete when my youngest, Anna, was born 19 years ago. Very, very weird.

But there is an adventure to be had. We spent yesterday filling a rental truck with all of Kristina’s worldly goods. Tomorrow, she and I will hit the road for Toronto. We’ve got ‘till

Thursday to get there. For all the times I’ve made the flight, I’ve never done this trip by ground.

So to mark the journey – and the experience — I’ll be posting daily Road Blogs.

Stay tuned!

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Wow, thanks!

It may not be Thanksgiving, but with Canada Day and Independence Day this past week and with summer in full swing, it’s pretty hard not to be thinking about what a fella is thankful for.

There’s life itself, great parents, an amazing wife and daughters who’ve managed not to inherit my faults and have taken in all the good stuff – and there’s plenty of that — their mom was able to pass on to them.

There are friends, travel, work, volunteering and seemingly random experiences that have enriched me and challenged my thinking.

There’s also a great country and province to call home, a place where the son of a bricklayer and secretary gets the same breaks and has the same opportunities as anybody else.

Of course, there’s also the shite. But there’s even stuff to be thankful for there.

Post stroke Tim looks at a stunning mountain range, a perfectly maintained ’64 Porsche and hears the subtleties of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo differently than pre stroke Tim did. The moment isn’t to be taken lightly; I drink it in and savor the taste. I try to lock it in my memory banks as brain food to draw on later. This sounds a little dorky when I play it back out loud with my robo reader.

But it is what it is. And it’s true.

Post-stroke, I write every day, I put out this blog, I’m sprucing up a book and I may even have a bead on a publisher. Pre-stroke Tim mostly just thought about writing.

I’m also thankful for timing and science.

If I’d stroked out when Canada was born – 148 years ago – I’d have been done for. The damage would have been even worse and the rehab non-existent.  I can’t bear to think about what life would have been like if I’d had a family. I’d have been useless to them and myself.

Even if I’d stroked out 10 or 20 years ago, I’m not so sure that I’d be working and living a life I’d call living.  There has been loads of improvement in stroke awareness and treatment. I’m sure that I benefited from this knowledge and thank God for that.

Had I stroked out today in another part of the world, I fear that my brain buzz would have had more dire consequences.  Would I have gotten the treatment I needed when I needed it? Time is money when it comes to this stuff. The more a brain fries, the more damage is done. And that makes it much harder to put humpty dumpty back together again.

I sometimes wonder if there’s another guy about my age who stroked out at the same time that I did in the same part of the brain, the only difference being that he lived in a part of the globe without the access to care that I had. What’s that guy’s life like today?

Yikes.

I’m also thankful that there’s hope today for the hell and the fear that people are facing right this second. I’m thankful that there are folks – like you and me — that can lend a hand. And that there’s hope for a lot of great moments to come.

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