Chase Your Dreams

We are writing from 37,000ft onboard our Westjet flight (that we nearly missed…) headed back for Toronto. Before we get into it, we ask that you please do not give us the gears about travelling mid pandemic. And if you are, you might as well stop reading here.

You maybe followed along our journey of the last six days via Instagram, but in case you missed it, here’s what we have been up to.

Through this global pandemic, it has felt like we have lost time…hasn’t it? Though time, unfortunately, has not paused, we still need to work towards our goals. NOW is still the time to go after what you want. Hopefully, by now it has sunk in that life as we knew it will soon have a new normal. So, why are we on a flight headed home from the West Coast? Because Amy is chasing her dreams! Her dream of owning a vacation rental in the mountains. When opportunity comes knocking you have got to answer the door… and then once you answer it, you can decide if it’s worth your time and energy. Amy, along with Freddy and brother Jay answered that door of opportunity and they are making shit happen. A dream they could have kept ‘wishing for’ but decided to put a plan into action. And Kate, well she is along for the ride. A cozy and spacious ride with everyone in masks headed on a four-hour flight. It was not this spacious on the way out West! This is after our STUNNING three-hour drive through the Rockies and soon, a three-hour drive back to Sarnia. But seriously, if you’ve never driven through the mountains, you need to!

The adventure started Thursday. We arrived in Calgary with a pre-booked minivan. But to our surprise, they were all out of minivans…who would have thought they were such a hot item? So, we ended up with a rather large white Expedition, we called it our hearse. We headed straight for IKEA, where Amy had a Click and Collect order patiently awaiting our arrival. The lovely IKEA staff wheeled out three stacked carts... THREE! How on earth were we going to fit this? A pair of scissors came in handy as we strategically started to open boxes on IKEA’s sidewalk. Customer after customer wheeling in and out next to us picking up their handy Click and Collect order. Thanks to some encouragement from others, we soon found out that we are absolutely not the only people that have had to do this. With cardboard sprawled all over the parking lot, the game of Tetris began. A game of Tetris that we lost and had two luggage bags we had to sacrifice and tied them to the roof of the hearse. This was only the beginning of our shopping spree. We headed into IKEA for more, then proceeded to Costco to fill every nook and cranny with towels, linens, décor and WINE. We were fully stocked...like we mean fully stocked. There was a pull-out couch in the back…in 100 pieces of course. But we got it all in and headed off to Invermere, BC.

We grabbed the keys Friday morning and started the makeover over on this cutie one-bedroom condo up in Panorama. We had no idea the time that would go into purging, as the condo was purchased fully furnished. If you’re looking for a futon in perfect condition, you can find it at the Columbia Valley Landfill. There were also some absolute treasures left behind like the “Winter in Panorama” framed poster from the 70s. We painted everything ceiling to floor, cleaned inside and out and built the damn 100 piece pullout couch from IKEA. It is massive! Let’s just say this was an oops on Amy’s part…check the fricken measurements before you order a couch, people! Not only is it a large sofa-bed but heavy as shit. You can bet there were a few F-bombs tossed around building that thing.

Oh, we cannot forget to mention that Cathy joined us to keep us in order! Or were we keeping her in order? That gal sure likes her wine 😊 Cathy is Fred and Jay’s mom, a friggen gem of a lady if you ever have the pleasure of meeting her. And one hell of a painter and cleaner and just about anything under the sun. She will also chat your ear off while doing it. And she captained the big white hearse for the duration of the trip. Good thing she can also navigate on her own because co-captain Amy is absolutely useless.

This place took a solid four days to crush this makeover, we had a little less downtime than we had initially expected. We were thinking beach days, patio nights…nope. But before we left town, we had some time to explore the backroads, jump on some trails for a mini hike and a patio beverage that we had been longing for since we can’t enjoy one in Ontario! Oh wait, we never found a patio. This resulted in a double Caesar at Calgary International Airport. Fun fact: it is rather difficult to run through an airport after one of those. It’s certainly not our favourite thing to hear over the PA “paging passengers Wilson and Bell for flight 676 to Toronto”. Shout out to Kate, who didn’t lose a single chip from the Chili’s platter we had ordered five minutes prior. Good thing YYC was a ghost town while we stampeded the halls for a ‘five-minute walk’ to our gate from Chili’s.

We hope that this tiny reminder of what travelling feels like sparks your drive to get going! Do what you can with what you got and make shit happen. The world isn’t standing still so let’s leave this pandemic in the dust. Let’s look back and be proud of what we did and thankful for what we learned from it.

Signing off from up above the Thunder Bay area. Mountains - we will be back VERY soon.

-Kate & Amy