Back in the recent past, a trip used to mean choosing a destination anywhere in the world. The fat UNESCO “bible” was consulted so none of Earth’s best sites would be inadvertently overlooked.

Airlines were smoothly contacted to buy tickets using pretend money called “Miles”. Hotels of charm, grace or geographic expedience were booked simply and easily through booking sites with best prices guaranteed. Afterwards, perhaps an on-line photo-book was made to fix memories as one palm tree does resemble another.

The major dilemmas were hand luggage or hold? Rent a car? or trust to public transport?  Is there an Iron Man competition somewhere to be avoided?

All that has come to a COVID19 end.

Growing up in 1960s Canada, vacations in our house were momentous, Rockwellian events:

• the black Ford Comet
• the handmade wooden car top carrier (with a handy hole for the tent poles to protrude)
• the green canvas tent (with porch)
• the Coleman stove
• the melted-ice-cube cooler, nylon sleeping bags and rubber air mattresses.

The parents were in the front, often with a baby on the lap of my mother who did not drive. Instead, she spent her days drying cotton diapers out of the little corner triangle window.

On the back vinyl bench, hot and slippery, were the unseatbelted three or four of us. Parents’ good Sunday clothes were hung in plastic bags on hangers on a hook above the windows. Our back-seat vision was limited.

We drove to the west coast: the Rockies, Jesus Saves (green stamps!). We drove to the east coast: the high tides of the Bay of Fundy and the Magnetic Hill. We drove to Quebec to spend the summer at a colleague minister’s house in a paper-mill town that was by the sea.

We sat in sticky unairconditioned cars for hours on end as our father covered hundreds of miles a day. In the evenings we pitched the heavy, damp tent at a camp-site with smelly quicklime toilets and went for a swim in a freezing cold lake. We rarely stayed more than one night, and there was usually hot cream-of-wheat for breakfast. It was tedious, uncomfortable and exciting all at the same time.

Our recent weekend trip to Burgundy was not of the same epic magnitude, of course, but it did set the same tone. There was the natural wonder of the stupendous underground caverns of Vallorbe and the Cistercian cultural wonder of the Abbey and Forge of Fontenay.

We did not camp, but booked rooms at a small chateau and an old water mill. Breakfasts were croissants and cheese and fruit. There were no kids in the back seat, but there was a 60s feel to the trip: Long stretches of small rural roads with endless cows and rolls of hay; eating half a sandwich for lunch at a roadside picnic table.

It was quite lovely to go forward to the past. Not a plane, not a taxi, not a line-up in sight.

 

 

I know exactly where there is a Confederate flag on public display just over the border in France. It is nailed to the wall of a seedy bar/restaurant that changes ownership regularly. The establishment is at a crossroads of two mountain valleys and the site was once of vital important to the Dukes of Savoy in the 15^th century.

It is now important to almost no one. The pub sports a perpetually “open” sign and is usually closed.

The flag is a relatively recent addition. Decades ago, before they got the flag, the place was a rowdy truck stop where you could get a not-bad 3-course hot meal and a jug of red wine for 25 French francs.  You sat with your back against the wall, and it was the closest thing I’ve seen in Europe to a Montana Saturday-night fist-fighting bar.

These days, there is a huge Harley-Davidson motorcycle gathering in the valley every summer, and the large Confederate flag seems to serve as an enticing element to try to attract the wild spirits of the grey-pony-tailed French motards to come in and drink a can of pop.

I suppose it’s a really bad thing, but I’m also pretty sure that everyone around here thinks it’s just another piece of foreign (American) junk cluttering up the countryside and of little real relevance. I mean, we have much more important things to worry about, such as getting the speed limit permanently back up to 90 kph on those steep and windy mountain roads.

And I don’t think anyone has Facebooked it and turned it into a galvanizing political issue as has happened in my sister’s town in southern Ontario.

In case you’ve missed all the drama, Stratford, Ontario, home of the Shakespeare Festival, has been called out for having red-necked racist elements lurking in it, as an actor (they’re not busy working as usual because of COVID19 this season) photographed and posted on social media a Confederate flag on display in someone’s front window.

Displaying flags or symbols is not against the law in Canada, but can be rather outrageous, to say the least. Canadians, by the way, LOVE their national flag, and it is displayed loudly and proudly all over the place. I can only conclude that it must be an American who lives behind the offending Confederate window display. He/she might even have a Harley—or at least wish for one–and aspire to attending the next H.O.G. Rally in the French Alps.

Of course, the overwhelmingly liberal and culturally-intellectual population of Stratford is appalled at being painted racist pigs for the whole world to see, and the last I heard my sister was organizing a demonstration to push over the head of Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Gardens in protest.

Without the magical distraction of the theatre this year, everyone has time on their hands to get into trouble. Falstaff would love it.