Today’s the Day it Sinks In

As my calendar is telling me, right now I should be riding somewhere in the vicinity of View Royal in Victoria. The Tour de Victoria 2020 was scheduled for today, and by this time I would have ridden from the parliament buildings out through Colwood, Metchosin and Langford and be approaching the Highlands.

But of course, I am about 850 km away. I have a nice ride lined up with the Bow Cyclists from Canmore to Banff tomorrow, but that’s weak sauce knowing that the trip to Victoria is truly, officially in a past that never happened now. I grumbled to Tammy and the kids last Thursday about how that would have been the day that we would have driven to Victoria, had things been normal this year. There are a lot of plans for a lot of people that have not panned out. I was really looking forward to Stephanie’s visit in July. Tammy and I keep reminding ourselves that things are going pretty well for us and that we have been weathering the pandemic pretty well. In the big picture, missing this trip in 2020 will only make 2021 sweeter (assuming it happens!).

This is the last weekend of my summer vacation. I had originally planned it a week later, with the start coinciding with the drive to Victoria and then having next week off as a “staycation” to round out August with the kids before they went back to school. When it was clear that our trip to Victoria wasn’t happening, I moved it up a week, to better line up with Tammy’s break between teaching terms. We had two weeks (minus a day and a half of work that I couldn’t take off when I moved my vacation) off together, which was nice. This week she’s been back to teaching.

We’ve done some activities with the kids:

• Buying a tent and setting it up for backyard camping a couple of times,
• Playing badminton in the park,
• Games night, movie night.

I hope that’s enough so that they don’t feel summer 2020 was a complete write-off. There’s not a lot of “events” that we will be able to point to when remembering the summer. In the second half, Ian has really spent a lot of time outside with Joey and Josh, and I expect that will be his major memory of the summer, which is great.

Looking ahead, the school season will be starting soon and I have very little confidence that the school year will unfurl as smoothly as the Education Minister seems to think. Both Miranda and Ian will be attending in person, masked up. My only consolation is that should they bring the virus home, there’s no chance that we will pass it further, given our family isolation.

Assuming we’re not struck down, my work schedule is already going to be nuts this fall. When I left for vacation my time was already being scheduled for October. I think I will turn around and it will be Christmas already.

I hope everyone had as good a summer as they could under the conditions. Stay happy, healthy and sane. 😊😷😜