While beach and sun are all well and good, I was eager to make the drive north to the cloud forests of the Monteverde region. Monteverde is located on the Continental Divide, where the Caribbean and Pacific slopes meet. It was about 2.5 hours from Jacó, so with a relatively early start, we were able to have a leisurely drive.

Our visit to Costa Rica had been long-awaited. My good friend Dave and I had actually gotten cheap flights to go back in early 2022, but we decided instead to take our pups out to Atlantic Canada (and as Giz’s last big adventure, I’m so glad we did). But I’d been itching to finally go, and as I usually try to take a trip around my birthday, Costa Rica was the obvious choice.

While my travel bucket list is lengthy and ever-growing, I have to admit that the United Arab Emirates hadn’t ever been on it. I suppose it just never crossed my mind to trek out to the Middle East and explore these desert metropolises. So when work decided to send me out to the UAE for two weeks, I was excited at the opportunity to explore a place I might not ever have come to.

It has become a bit of a tradition now for the family to meet (somewhere in Western Canada) for what we’ve fondly dubbed “Septembermas"—a Fall familial gathering in lieu of braving the holiday chaos to convene in December. This year, Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta was our chosen destination.

By some witchcraft, the notoriously rainy and foggy Faroe Islands were not playing true to form. We took advantage of the gloriously sunny skies by journeying to Eysturoy, the second largest island in the archipelago. It was a beautiful, scenic coastal drive, with a multitude of pull-outs to ogle the mountain views and inlets.

As my parents are avid bird photographers, no trip to the Faroe Islands would be complete without a visit to the famed island of Mykines. The westernmost islands in the Faroese Archipelago, it is known to be a significant nesting site for seabirds, such as puffins, fulmars and gannets. While I had spotted a lone puffin on our first day in the Faroe Islands, I was particularly excited to see my first puffin colony.

One of my favourite days spent touring the Faroe Islands was on Kalsoy, a small northern island that is only accessible by ferry. End to end, the island is only a 20-minute drive, making it perfect for a leisurely day trip, exploring the small villages and hiking to some epic vistas.

The first reaction I typically got when I said I would be exploring the Faroe Islands for a week was… “and where’s that”? This apparently little-known cluster of 18 islands in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Scotland is actually an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark (similar to Greenland). I’d glimpsed dramatic photos of its rugged, wind-swept landscapes over the years, and so it had occupied a place on my travel bucket list for some time.

In late September 2021, with my parents visiting and after being cooped up in pandemic lockdown for too many months, I was eager to stretch my legs and spend a weekend in Algonquin Provincial Park for a bit of hiking and, well, “leaf peeping”. A rather ridiculous and bizarrely suggestive term for the lovely activity of enjoying fall foliage. Despite living in Ontario for 5 years, I had never been up to Algonquin.

Over the past several years, I’ve had superstitions around visiting Québec, as I’ve come to associate it with a string of romantic bad luck. It was the last trip my ex-husband and I took before we separated; it was the trip I was planning with an ex as we split up; even had an ex who lives in Montreal, where we’d talked about our exploring the city together. So when it came time to deciding where I wanted to spend my winter holidays and work remotely for the first weeks of 2023, I thought it high time that Québec and I buried the ol’ hatchet.

As the year draws to a close, it is a natural and indeed common time to reflect upon the past 12 months. At first thought, my mind naturally went to the negative—the romantic disappointments, job stresses, and Gizmo’s ill-health, to name a few. As humans, negative experiences and feelings are distorted in our memories, given disproportionate saliency and crowding out the host of positive memories we may hold.

At the beginning of 2022, after going through one of the longest lockdowns (in the world) during the pandemic, I was eager to stretch my legs and escape the city. My friend Dave was similarly itching to get away, and so we hatched a plan to pack up our dogs and drive somewhere to spend the rest of the winter. We originally toyed with going all the way out to the West Coast, but timing and logistics made that difficult, so we settled on heading out to Atlantic Canada.