The last time I picked up Tamara from the airport we already knew something was going wrong in the world. COVID-19 was literally shutting down the world airport by airport as Tamara was coming home from a business trip to Kenya where she was checking on the 5-star accommodations that she regularly sold to her clients. I was parked in front of the arrivals level at Pearson Terminal 3 waiting for her connecting flight from Zurich to touch down while listening to Prime Minister Trudeau give his “It’s Time to Come Home” speech to all Canadians. We drove home, collapsed in our apartment, and fell into lockdown.
We worried we’d never travel again. Things got pretty bad in our neighbourhood. We relocated to Ottawa for 3 months to avoid the soaring infection rates. Tamara lost her job. We came back to Toronto. We moved to a new loft and left the rapidly deteriorating apartment building that we first shared together. Vaccines were invented, and enough people got vaccinated that Tamara got her job back.
555 days after I picked Tamara up at YYZ and we were living our old lives again but…extra.
But 555 days wasn’t enough to edit all the footage we’ve shot so far so we’ve still got a lot of videos to upload: Our return to Iceland’s northwest fjords for our honeymoon. Our anniversary trip through eastern Canada covering Quebec, PEI, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. And our big trip to Africa when I got to tag along with Tamara as she evaluated some of the top hotels and lodges in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Tamara also has 2 solo trips to Africa Kenya and Tanzania and we have some family we’d like to introduce you to that also share our adventurous spirit, my brother Greg who is a GP in the polar bear capital of the world in Canada’s far north, and his wife Jessica who is an accomplished stage and production manager.
555 days later and we’re getting read to take our first trip in a post-vaccine world: We’re going to explore the Klondike trails of the Canadian Yukon! We’ve done our homework, and booked some remarkable accomodations. We even got new equipment that we can’t wait to take for a tour including a drone that I flew for some test flights around our home base of Toronto (and made the video below!)
It feels great to be about to head off on another adventure. It feels like the culmination of the most testing 18 months of our lives…so far, so we won’t take a minute of it for granted and we will take more detours.
Mike & Tamara
September 22, 2021
Toronto From Above
