Hallo lovlies, it’s been a while. 🙂
We have arrived in London Ontario, one of the two home towns of the Burazzos (the other, of course, being Toronto, the big smoke, where we are headed next).
The flight was… delightful. Or at least, not nearly as bad as we might have experienced. WestJet for the win.
Best advice by airlines, these days, is to arrive 2.5 hours prior to takeoff. This directive had us seated at the gate by 8:00am (through both luggage checkin and security), with two hours to spare. Sure, why not? I’d rather wait on site than at home, worried that we’d be held up somewhere. I always choose two int he hand. Point is this… we arrived at our destination (more or less on time), along with our luggage (much more slowly than one might imagine from a tier 4, international airport), and an hour after landing, we were on our way into the Forest City ™ of London Ontario. YXU, the Sollazzo homeland.
Ontario, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, has an… oppressive quality to it. I’m not talking about its politics, although it could be so classified. Oppression comes in the form of humidity, and you feel it, smell it, the moment you leave your air conditioned micro climate. Having grown up with it, I can never un-remember it. Having lived away from it for 36 years, I think I kind of miss it now. That and the freshwater smell of the Great Lakes.
Both greeted us in our first minutes on the ground.
So here we are, back home. Ontario will always be home to me, even after those 36 years, and when we retire, we will likely return. I don’t not appreciate the strides and steps we’ve taken in Calgary, to make it more livable, more cultured and connected, more cosmopolitan. But eventually, I just want to live in a place that doesn’t vandalize its rainbow crosswalks, and where I can feel good pulling for a team that’s expected to fail in the second round of the Stanley Cup.
Home is where the heart is, and Ontario feels it to me. Sure, the mountains are grand, and prairies… flat. But there’s something about the rollers and dunes at Grand Bend, the smell of red pine in shield country, or the lakes of the cottage. I’m torn. But mostly, I’m deflated by the intolerance and parochial thinking that still pervades much of Alberta.
Looking squarely at you, Sundre.
And so here we are. We spend time with family, breathe in the moist warm air, and we take our walks with family.