In recent weeks, I’ve taken to walking early in the morning. Every day. I follow a number of routes around town, each about five or six kilometres in length. The walks – sometimes I jog – remind me of the times back at high school when I would run 10 or 15 kilometres with the cross-country team, without even batting an eye. Anyway, one day last week, an acquaintance greeted me during my walk. “Why so early in the day?” he asked.
“Beat the heat, for one thing,” I said. “And because there’s nobody around.”
It was true. Particularly this last Civic Holiday weekend, our town felt like a ghost town. Everybody seemed to have vacated for somewhere else. Not unusual for summer, I guess, what with cottages, camping and people travelling abroad when the kids are not in school.
And I’ve realized that there are some definite advantages to spending summer closer to home. At the very least, at our grocery stores, the queues are shorter. Service has been quicker at the bank too because there are fewer customers, including at peak times. I even made a rare trip to the regional waste management facility (a.k.a. the dump) and I was in and out of there in minutes. I’ve come to the conclusion that this must be what a “stay-cation” looks like.
Canadians understand the value of vacation time. Like most people living in northern hemispheres on the planet, they recognize the temperate days between June 21 and September 21 are limited and precious. They mostly plan their time away from work in summer, and they make the most of those days they can spend comfortably outdoors.
And this summer is no exception. This year, some members of my family took advantage of the seasons to take the train from Halifax to Vancouver; in particular they’ve relished the leg through the Rocky Mountains. Close friends have gone overseas for a long-awaited cruise around the Adriatic. And others have fled to cottages in Ontario’s wilderness to leave work, cellphones, and the rat race behind until the cool air of late August descends.
In addition, it turns out that some citizens of this country have specifically avoided travelling to the “excited States of America” this year. Offensive presidential tweets and aberrant gun behaviour have dissuaded many from spending their holiday bucks there.
A market researcher from the Vancouver area has gathered data from such organizations as the U.S. International Trade Association and from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Barb Justason, quoted in the Vancouver Sun, says Canadian visits to the U.S. have dropped steadily since 2013. It’s due partly to fluctuations of the Canadian dollar.
“(But) the election of Donald Trump has emboldened racists, homophobes and misogynists,” she said. “I don’t want to go there and enjoy privilege as a white person that other people don’t have.”
Between 2014 and 2016, the Canadian dollar dropped 22 per cent in tandem with a drop of 20 per cent in the number of Canadians crossing the border. In 2017 – roughly the mid-point of Trump’s current presidency – Canadians made 48 million trips to the U.S., or about 14 million fewer than the year before.
The same Sun story quotes a research group in Vancouver, Insights West, who’ve learned from their studies that 31 per cent of Canadians were reconsidering travel to the U.S. because of the political climate there. They call it “the Trump effect,” and yet one in five Canadians in the survey did say they would visit the U.S. as they normally do.
Whether U.S.-bound or not, a lot of people in our town seem to have flown the coop this summer. There are times – not only during my early-morning walks – when you could shoot the proverbial cannon down any street and not scratch anybody.
As I say, check-out lines in stores aren’t as long and waiting times to get services, at least from my perspective, have felt shorter. However, it depends on what service or product you need, especially at the height of vacation time.
On Civic Holiday Monday, I noticed some stores were open, so I dropped in to buy some fresh corn. I visited two local grocery stores. Both had tables where the grocers had laid out cobs of corn. But both stores had none left. I asked one of the grocery clerks why there was no corn.
“They cleaned us out on Thursday,” she said. “People heading out of town bought all the corn we had.”
I guess that’s the trade-off. I get to enjoy a lot more peace and quiet around town during my stay-cation, but when the summer travellers escape, they take all the supplies they’ll need for their vacations with all the comforts of home.
