Albertans love to travel, especially if it means we get to stay home.
Among the water cooler conversation fodder recently released by the province’s Office of Statistics and Information, it turns out Albertans like staycations. We took 19.05 million trips within the province in 2011, meaning we make up 81.1 per cent of the province’s tourists — up from the year prior.
Maybe you can’t count yourself among that free-wheeling, highway-lovin’ group. Maybe you’ve been too busy this summer to do much more than beat a well-worn path from home to car to work and back again, with brief interludes on the couch watching Pan Am reruns and wondering what it’s like to be a stewardess and travel for a living.
This week is likely your last chance to get your Robert Frost on and take the road less travelled — or any road, really — while said road is still dry and maybe, just maybe, tantalizingly blurred in the distance by heat rising off the asphalt.
Alternatively, perhaps you’ve already done enough Alberta road trips for one summer. It could be time to start planning for a bigger trip.
Athabasca’s Rotary Club recently welcomed Spencer Beveridge home from a year abroad in Germany.
Beveridge characterized his trip in terms many of us have used to describe our travels, with words like “amazing” and “awesome.”
But it’s not just the adjective-eliciting sights and experiences that make travel so important. Travel forces us to make a clean break with the familiar, and that’s important, not because we all feel trapped in our day-to-day lives and homes, but perhaps because we don’t.
As Alain de Botton once rather beautifully, if solemnly, wrote for The Guardian, “The familiar curtains and pictures subtly insist that we should not change because they do not; our well-known rooms can anaesthetise us from a more urgent, necessary relationship with particular questions.”
Travel might not be the answer, but it’s a start. Take a trip, even if it’s just to a local campground, before the summer’s out. Like Frost, you may find it makes all the difference.
