O Canada

Twenty months ago, I stood on the concrete doorstep of a two-room house in the middle of nowhere. Literally the middle of nowhere. For the past two weeks, we had been cooking for a group of loud, hard working, heavy-eating Canadians. They had been busy, definitely working hard, but also playing hard. Between the lot of them, they wired our house for electricity, landscaped the front ‘lawn’ to keep the rains from washing out the bank, surveyed the camp property, and – oh yeah – called me Brittany (somehow, they never could keep track of my name).

As they all drove away, I turned to Andrea: “Isn’t it weird to be meeting all these people that you’ll never see again on this side of heaven?”

She laughed at me, we talked about it for a bit, and then walked back into the house and kept on cleaning up after them.

But after hearing all their stories about Canada, British Columbia, Vancouver, and their snow-capped mountains, I knew I would someday – someday – go to experience it for myself. Twenty months later and I did. I finally got to see the Pacific Northwest, checked off yet another trip from my life’s bucket list, and got to watch a hockey game.

(By the way. It was in Uganda when I first heard about Tim Horton’s. For a couple weeks, the Canadians were bemoaning the lack of coffee made by Tim Horton’s…and praising its virtues. Apparently [cough, cough] my coffee making attempts weren’t spectacular enough; I’m surprised, really, that they even drank the  horrible horrible coffee I served them over there. Coffee is quite literally their life. Fo’real. My coffee, though, is hands down NOT amazing. Not sure how they survived two weeks on coffee made by that American girl. But somehow they did.)