If
you love to travel as much as I do, then you would know that there is no better
feeling than getting ready for a much-anticipated trip, other than actually
leaving. You have to be so organized and
prepared, making sure all of your bills are paid beforehand, that your hotel
reservations are made for the right dates and confirmed, and that you have paid
beforehand for your bus or train trip.
Personally, I prefer taking the bus on a road trip, rather than renting
a car or driving my own car or taking the train. I have a very good reason for my personal
travel preferences.
Last
summer, purely by accident, while browsing the Internet, I visited the
Greyhound Canada web site and found a special travel bus pass that is meant for
anyone who loves to travel on the road.
It’s called the “Discovery Canada Pass”.
This special travel bus pass is like the TTC Metro Pass used in Toronto,
which allows one adult unlimited travel for one month on public transit within
the city limits. The Discovery Canada
Pass, similarly, allows an adult unlimited travel on the bus throughout Canada,
and parts of the United States as well, for a given length of time. You can buy these passes for anywhere from 7
days’ to 60 days’ duration. Once you’ve
purchased such a pass, you may travel anywhere, at anytime and access a bus at
any location simply by showing your Discovery Canada Pass. It is good on different buses other than
Greyhound, as well. It must be used
within the validated time period that you have previously chosen for yourself,
and must be purchased in advance (if you want it delivered by mail to your home
before you leave on your trip), but otherwise, there are no restrictions,
relatively speaking.
In
addition, the prices for the various Discovery Canada Passes are amazingly
reasonable! In year 2004, I was planning
to take a road trip on the bus around the north shore of the Great Lakes, Huron
and Superior. Initially, I wanted to go
only as far as Thunder Bay, Ontario before returning home to Toronto. I even thought of going west as far as
Alberta where I had previously lived in Calgary for almost a decade of my
earlier adult life. However, upon
checking out the regular adult bus fares to Calgary and Edmonton, it quickly
became apparent that for me to pay regular bus fare would be out of the
question. It was way too expensive for
me. There had to be a better way, I
thought, so travelling using a bus pass for a given length of time suddenly
looked very appealing to me. I decided
to buy a pass for 10 days’ duration, starting about mid-August, and it would
cost me only about $256.00 to travel to western Canada! Compared to regular bus fare, it was a
terrific bargain! The regular fare from
Toronto, Ontario to Edmonton, Alberta, round-trip, at the time, was well over
$600.00 - more than double the pass fare!
I had been well-travelled during my youth and earlier adult life, yet I
was shocked at the exorbitant cost of such a trip! How was anyone supposed to enjoy a trip at
all if all they could afford to do was to get on and off a bus?
So,
the Discovery Canada Pass opened up a whole new range of exciting possibilities
to enable me to travel and see a good part of North America (at my leisure)! All of a sudden, I could see that I did not
need to be limited by a bus fare that was outrageously expensive to pay!
On
this particular pass that I had purchased, there was accessibility to all parts
of Canada, from east coast to west. In
addition, certain “direct routes” to various cities in the U.S. could also
become accessible to me in my future travels to the eastern seaboard. Cities like New York, Philadelphia and
Boston, and states like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Virginia – in most
cases, places that I had never before visited - were not too far away from my
hometown of Toronto and were definitely within the realm of travel reality for
me. Upon discovering this special travel
bus pass, I resolved to never again limit my travels simply because I thought
it was too expensive to consider visiting a particular place, no matter where
it was located.
While
travelling west in Ontario along the north shore of Lake Huron, towards Lake
Superior and Lake Michigan, I accidently came upon the summer
vacation spot that I’d always sought, but had never found. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario has got to be
one of the most beautiful places to visit in the summer time! It’s almost completely surrounded (on three
sides) by water, making it one of my favourite places to stay. Since August 2004, I have stayed at the Days
Inn in Sault Ste. Marie on three different occasions and plan on staying there
in the summer a whole lot more from now on. It’s so scenic and peaceful and I can’t
imagine a nicer place to visit in Ontario or anywhere else in Canada for that
matter.
A
colleague of mine, a teacher whose name is Serena, used to tell me and other
colleagues of ours (usually at lunch time) about the exotic destinations she
had visited already. She would tell us
about places she’d visited in Southeast Asia, like Thailand and Singapore; she
had also been to China, India and Pakistan.
And, I was so jealous that she felt the freedom to go to these remote
places completely on her own, with no one to show her how it should be
done. Of course, I realized that the
only way to access these places was to travel there via plane or boat.
I
asked Serena one day at lunch time, “I’m really curious - how do you find the
courage to go to such far off places without knowing exactly where you’re going
to be on a day-by-day basis?”
And,
she replied, “Because I just love to travel.
That’s what makes me truly happy.
Plus, I love the adventure of not knowing exactly what’s going to happen
while I’m visiting a particular country.
In fact, every day is a new adventure for me.” She added, “Nothing, not even teaching, can
fill that gap for me, so I’m always looking ahead to my next big trip, and I
always will.”
However,
it did help to plan her travels better because she could take advantage of the
“four-over-five” program offered to full-time teachers. Under this program, teachers who subscribed
to this program could work for 4 years, get paid 80% of their salary per year,
and bank the rest for travelling (or whatever else they wanted to do) in the
fifth year.
I
wanted to travel as she had done, but I had been at home in Canada for so long
- about the last 25 years or so - that I thought I would seriously lack the
courage to venture out on my own in a strange country, with only the help of a
travel agent to guide my planning. It
quite literally “scared the hell out of me” that, one day, I just might find it
in myself to pack my belongings into a backpack (or something very portable)
and go wherever and whenever I wanted in the world (assuming that I am retired
or have some free time). The idea of
staying somewhere very strange, completely on my own, and coping all by myself
in countries with strange customs, languages, food, people, and so on, was very
frightening. It also seemed like a very
exciting way to live. I was very
intrigued and wanted very much to free myself from my own self-imposed limits
and allow myself to enjoy travel and its fantastic benefits to the fullest
extent.
Travelling
around the world is a kind of education, the kind you would never get at school
because it’s very informal in nature.
Travel teaches you different ways of thinking and allows you to see the
world through different eyes, doing things and coping in different ways with
life’s challenges. To be sure, it’s a
growth experience. You could not help
but mature as a person by travelling around the world and not limiting yourself
in any way from life’s experiences.
Thus,
I have made up my mind that, no matter how long it takes, I will take some
significant trips to different parts of the world and will do my best to
assimilate the knowledge I obtain from those trips into my own personal
knowledge base. This should help me to
cope better with different and strange things that I will encounter and not be
afraid that I will not be a good traveller.
After all, I was a fairly good traveller when I was younger and had
enjoyed many of the trips I had taken with my family and significant others in
my life. Why should anything have
changed from that time?
In
the spring of 1981, for example, I went on a trip to Europe for 29 days with my
best girlfriend at the time, Gloria, and we had an absolute blast there! We were both in our late 20’s at the time. We spent a few days in London, England on our
own, and then we joined a bus tour around Europe for 19 days. The tour started in London and was supposed
to end there too, but we decided to end the tour early for ourselves in Paris,
France, so that we could spend some additional time in Paris before flying home
to Canada. I thought that this trip was
a life-changing experience and, thank God, I wrote a daily journal about the
trip’s events and our experiences. After
I got back home and later wanted to read it over, I could not believe what we
had experienced in Europe! One thing is
certain, I will never forget our trip to Europe as long as I live, and I would
dearly love to return to Paris one day and stay for about a month (at least 2-3
weeks anyway!). I would concentrate on
learning the French language better, becoming more fluent in French and,
generally, becoming more comfortable with the French people. They can be very friendly to foreigners, as
long as they know that you are willing to at least try to communicate with them
in French, which I was! The French tend
to love Canadians for some reason that I don’t completely understand, and they
do not tend to like Americans at all, again for some unknown reason. So, I’m glad that I am a Canadian and that,
one day, I may very well get a chance to go back to Paris, and, while there,
I’d also love to visit some other places in Europe that I have never seen
before.
Who
knows what strange and exotic places I will get to see in my lifetime? All I want is the chance and the choice to go
any place I want and stay for as long as I want. I know the experience will be well worth the
wait.
Of
course, there are other wonderful benefits to travel as well, no matter how you
travel to any given destination. I am
familiar with a program called the “Wyndham Rewards” program (a.k.a. the “Trip
Rewards” program). I, myself, am a
member of this particular trip rewards program that includes more than 6,000
hotels (of which Days Inn is a member, where I stay most of the time). You can earn points or air miles for
qualified stays. You can enjoy free
nights with no “blackout” dates (like holidays and peak travel times). You can also choose from hundreds of reward
options, such as gift cards, airline tickets, and resort vacations. And, finally, you can take advantage of
special member offers.
In
addition, if you are an Ontario secondary school teacher like me, you are
automatically a member of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation
(OSSTF). There are special travel (and
other benefits) offered to those who are members of our federation. Obviously, teachers can become better at
their chosen profession by travelling for pleasure or by going elsewhere in the
world to teach other children in other countries. There are exchange programs in which teachers
can participate that will allow them to take another teacher’s position in
another country and have that same teacher take their own position in
Canada. That is a fantastic opportunity
for both teachers to see the world and also contribute something meaningful
from their teaching experience to other children in other countries.
All
in all, travel and teaching are both wonderful pursuits, and if you want to
somehow combine these two activities by working somewhere else in the world as
a teacher, you would only benefit from doing so. That is really the perfect vehicle for
someone like me, who wants to travel around the world, and still maintain her
teaching status and professionalism, not to mention the invaluable experience
gained from doing wonderful things, such as, travelling to various countries of
the world and learning all about other cultures, food, languages and people.
published by Authorhouse, copyright 2011, Anne Shier. All rights reserved.
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