Greetings from the Great White North

A behind-the-scenes peek at the constant glamour that is travel life, with all the sarcasm and then some.

Dearest Gentle Reader,

Welcome to Orangeville. I find myself stopped here for the night after a quick trip to Ottawa, Canada’s capital (pictured above), to pick up my replacement e-residency card at the Estonian embassy.

Note to self: the bottom of your desk drawer is not a happy place for the chip card ID that provides access to your business records, contract signing ability, and bank accounts.

It’s been a stressful wait for the replacement. The day after Estonian officials said it was ready, off I went to see the very nice lady at the embassy in Ottawa to retrieve it.

A 600km (370 mile) drive two days before Christmas… what could go wrong?

Oh, just the usual winter in Canada. I’ll admit, I paid the extra four cents a litre for full-serve gas at Mallorytown ONRoute. The car’s display said it was around -13 Celsius; that’s “don’t have anything to drink so you don’t have to stop to pee” weather in my books.

I made it there okay yesterday. But after six hours of progressively worsening weather and dodging semis, and having gone through an entire jug of windshield washer fluid today, I finally ended up sideways on the highway behind a car that was stopped dead in the live traffic lane. They’d been forced to stop partway up an incline and, without snow tires, just couldn’t get going again.

I cannot handle these shenanigans in the dark and snow. That was when I decided to call it a night.

I hit the Boston Pizza in Orangeville first for a bite and to poach the wifi so I could finish up work for the day and compare hotel rates.

Don’t let anyone tell you remote work life is all glamour. It’s not always laptops on beaches (in fact, sand in your keyboard and screen glare should have put that myth to bed by now).

Sometimes, nomad life is the dark corner of a sports bar, an overpriced personal pan, and a basketball game at 130 decibels.

Two hours later, with email inboxes under control, meetings scheduled, and tomorrow’s news ready to fire, I was more than ready for a hot shower and a rest.

I grabbed a room with a fireplace at a well-known chain, whose name I won’t share here because surely to the goddesses, this is a one-off, and I don’t want to be a jerk.

The room itself is pretty cute. And listen, it was NOT cheap. I wasn’t expecting to spend more for a place to crash (or not 💥 crash, as the case may be) in a small town on the way home than I spent for a Marriott in Ottawa.

I can’t help but think of these things in terms of other trips that could’ve been. One stupid snowed-in hotel night in Canada =

• 8 nights at that adorable family-run hotel I loved in Antigua, Guatemala

• 2 sushi train dinners for two in Wellington, New Zealand

• 1 insanely cheap ticket to Iceland with WOW airlines right before they went under for having unsustainably cheap flights to cool places

But sometimes, you just do what you have to do. It beats sleeping in the car.

So anyways… that hot shower?

I’m pretty well done with today.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be up early and hopefully hop right in behind the snowplows to get back. I’m lucky to have a chef 👨‍🍳 at home and two teens we’ve been training up on potato and carrot peeling to get the Christmas feast we’re serving for 20 going.

In the meantime, I’ll be doing my best Willy Nelson over here, just waiting to get back on the road again. And not touching anything.