It’s pretty hard to write a travel blog, like I’ve said, when you’re not currently travelling and have no tangible plans to hit the road.

But… I did hit the road recently. It was a pretty quick process – in about a 4 week period, I quit my job of almost 7 years, packed up everything I own (aside from the random crap we abandoned on the floor of the old apartment, but that’s not relevant here), found a new job in a new city in a new industry, and left Montreal behind for the slick streets of Toronto. And I never thought I would up and leave – everyone had me pegged as a Montreal-lifer. Indeed, I was coming pretty close to it: I priced condos, looked into mortgage options.

At the end of the day, we decided to throw caution to the wind. My smizmar re-enrolled in the University of Toronto, we put our apartment up for rent, and did a 24-hour journey to Toronto to find an apartment, closely followed a few weeks later by another 24-hour jaunt down to Toronto for two back-to-back job interviews at two very different companies (see my semi-drunken rambling from my last blog post, written on the train home from those interviews) which both materialized into offers.

In the time between when we made the decision to leave and the time the U-Haul pulled out of the illegal park job I did in the back alley behind our Outremont place, we went through a lot. We dealt with a lot of loss in a very short period: I buried my grandfather after a long battle with lung cancer, and we had to put 3 of our pets to sleep, including my smizmar’s beloved Moo. I said good bye to my friends and family. I had numerous freak-outs about finding work, and trying to navigate the EI system in case nothing materialized. I bid farewell to a close friend who moved to Iceland – I can go back to Montreal to visit my friends any time, but she is an ocean away, in the shadow of a volcano, living the good life. I learned how to drive a truck out of sheer necessity.

And now it’s thankfully over.

And I have a job I really like, that believes in beer o’clock. Which is why I am writing again – because all we do is talk about travel all day. And changing people’s lives. And embracing the bizarre. I feel like a decade has been shaved off my life, and I wake up excited every day to go in. I get excited, my eyes are wide, my smile is broad. I am home.