Executive Summary (and moralizing)

For all you executives out there reading my blog - you know who you are - this one's for you.

You: who don't have time to read the whole blog. Here's the trip in a nutshell.

You'll also find the moral(s) to my story - the place where I sum up what I learned from this trip, why it was worth it all in the end, why I did it, and how I've grown as a person from it.

But keep in mind - those of you who are skipping all my finely considered prose and just reading this executive summary - I'm offering special prizes to all who claim to have read the whole blog and can answer three questions testing their knowledge of what is contained in these pages...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I spent a month canoeing through the Czech Republic, from roughly its centre to its western border with Germany, where I stopped paddling because I wasn't having much fun. The trip failed to live up to my expectations because: (1) almost no one spoke English, so I was by myself and lonely most of the time, and (2) paddling upstream for nearly 20 days (240 km) was a real pain.

Stats
Total km paddled/wheeled: 485
Total days paddled/wheeled: 24
Total days off: 5
Total paddle strokes (estimate): 288,000
Total beer consumed en route (estimate): 30 litres
Total rocks hit: 5,641

I decided on a whim to backtrack to Karlovy Vary for the International Film Festival there, where I watched 3 films a day for 9 days, while camping in a stadium with hordes of other film buffs. It was the best film fest I've ever been to. I had a great time. I managed through much effort to sell my canoe to a fellow in Prague at a great discount, and headed for Slovenia for no good reason.

The couchsurfer I stayed with in Slovenia got me into climbing that country's highest mountain, Triglav, which I did - and it was the best experience of the trip. I finished my week-long stay in Slovenia on the Adriatic coast.

On the way back to Amsterdam to catch my flight home, I stopped in to visit Vikki and her boyfriend Sergio (they had joined me for a few days of paddling earlier) in Bern . Loved it.

The End


Now for the moralizing:

"Why did I need to do this?" I often asked myself. I've been home for 3 weeks now, and the answer is still in progress. I've developed various theories (and they all hold some truth, I think): that I needed to suffer to make me appreciate how good my life was; that I needed to exorcise unfinished business from my 20s - like the idea for this trip - before I could grow up and move on. Now, I think I just needed to make a break with my life in Wakefield. I could have done anything. I just needed to halt the forward momentum (or was it kick me out of my inertia?) of my complacent, easy, contented, unchallenging, unambitious life. Throw a wrench in its works.

One of the personal realizations that grew out of this trip was that I have consciously set up all sorts of limitations on my life and what I can do, believing, perhaps, that I could find happiness by narrowing my options, shaving them down to fine point. But I painted myself into a corner here in Wakefield - made my world so small that I became desperate to break out. I still think Wakefield is a very nice place to live - and plan to continue making my home here - but it can no longer be my whole world.

It was silly, I suppose, to try to make it so. But it's the same old story with me: swinging from one extreme until I'm driven to the other; I live in Toronto, then flee to Wakefield.

The trip also raised the question for me: is there much value in travel anymore? Maybe 50 years ago, before globalization had really taken off, and tourism to boot, travel was a way to experience truly different cultures. But now, much of the world is different only in superficial details, and the parts of the world that are still quite different are usually also quite fucked up, and not places you'd want to go.

Now, I feel a much stronger desire to get to know this region better - I've never explored the Laurentians or the Eastern townships, for instance, or New England - than to travel to distant places.

Somehow, also, this crazy trip has made me more normal. I've seen how I've been afraid of "normal" my whole life (another self-imposed limitation), and how this trip was part of that. I couldn't simply behave like all the other tourists in Europe - I had to do something never done before. Yet when I quit my supposedly adventurous canoe trip and started seeing Europe in a way closer to other tourists (although, admittedly, couchsurfing is not exactly mainstream, at least not yet), I enjoyed myself much more. Next time, I may even buy a guide book.

Is Europe better than Canada? That was one question in the back of my brain as I left for this trip. I had chosen Europe for my destination because I didn't want to go to another oh-so-interesting-in-its-disfunctionality Third World country. I wanted to go somewhere where they seemed to have it a bit more together - socially and environmentally - than we in North America. It's a hard question to answer after so short a trip, but my impression is quite positive of Europe. It's not that it's significantly better, but in subtle ways, I prefered the cultures I found there to Canadian culture. Perhaps the most significant difference I noticed was that Europeans seemed generally less afraid of each other than Canadians. I think that our much vaunted politeness is actually a sign of our fear of each other; it stems not from graciousness but from a reluctance to get involved, to open up to strangers, to be intimate. Perhaps because we have the space here, we tend to take it (that and our largely British heritage, of course). But in Europe, they don't have the option of running away so much. They must engage each other.

I don't want to overstate my case, though. Canada is a wonderful place to live, and in some ways is better than Europe, such as with multiculturalism. Europeans, with their more rigid sense of national identies, have a harder time with immigrants than we do. Also, Europeans have lousy breakfasts - how I missed the greasy spoons of my birthplace.

Was the trip "worth it"? I suppose I got what I needed out of it - but I don't think it was particularly good value. I didn't need to blow all my savings to get what I needed, and I could have had a lot more fun doing it.

Anyway, believe it or not, I'm not sick of canoeing yet. In fact, I'm just killing time here, rambling on about my feelings, etc., while waiting for a friend to come over to take the canoe out on the Gatineau for a little afternoon spin.

Thanks for reading.