The last day on the road

It's officially the end of summer. I'll start work again in two days. My parents have left after visiting me up here for a week. The weather is definitely autumnal. It's time – By special request, I'm finishing off my series of posts on my road-trip. It's been a month, so it's now or never. I choose “now,” I guess. Here it is, the final post, on Yorkton to Regina, July 30^th:

Woke up from a fitfully cold night of sleep (thanks to the ceiling fan that had been kept on all night). I was ready to hit the road in my usual twenty minutes. Snapped some shots of downtown Yorkton before turning onto the highway. The open road somehow seemed sadder that day. That part of the prairies was hillier than the stretch from Edmonton to Yorkton, and views of the various small valleys were spectacular.

Drove into the outskirts of Regina after about two and a half hours. We had Sunday brunch at a busy restaurant. The meal included a mix of cuisines, from the ordinary “brunch offerings” of omelets, sausages, hash-browns, and fresh fruit, to spring rolls, perogies, fried chicken, and ribs.

It was another fifteen minutes or so to the airport. The tree-lined streets and boulevards reminded me very much of some of the streets in Vancouver, more specifically 12^th Avenue, with its older heritage-style homes. Once we arrived at the airport, we found out that it was too early for me to check in, and had to sit in the lounge for a large part of a hour before I could go to the counter and get my suitcase off my hands. And so, we waited.

Checked in, and had two hours to kill before I needed to go through security, so we decided to go to the park by the legislature and walk around the lake. The wooded grove was beautiful. It was the beginning of my “summer of trees.” We walked the entire Blue Trail, and had an ice-cream before heading back to the airport.

S. dropped me off without a goodbye. I had said that I wouldn't say goodbye, and I didn't. I had decided that I was sick of goodbyes. I used to be quite good at them, at making spiels, at sounding like a cliché. Ultimately, I realized that I didn't want to remember goodbyes. I just wanted to remember the moments that mattered most, and goodbyes were never those to me.

There – the end of my posts on the road-trip. I finished something after all this summer.