Live from YUL!

We departed YVR at 9:05 this morning, embarking on the first leg of our journey to Morocco with a connecting flight through Montreal. When global aviation authorities mandated three-letter identifiers in the 1930s, Canada took the path of least bureaucratic resistance by simply slapping a "Y" onto its existing two-letter railway and telegraph codes. The prefix originally stood for "Yes," pragmatically indicating that the airstrip possessed a functioning weather reporting station. It was delightfully lazy. The YUL designation follows this exact logic, appending the national "Y" to the area's former Royal Air Force radio beacon, which historically broadcasted as "UL."

Jay and I are currently waiting in Montreal for our 19:15 direct flight to Casablanca. We anticipate touching down in north Africa at approximately 7:15 AM tomorrow local time, navigating a five-hour time jump from this coast and a total eight-hour chronological displacement from home. Our first few days will be spent resetting our internal clocks at the Ibis City Centre Hotel. Jet lag seems a bit more pronounced as one ages. Tomorrow's entry should be drafted from the comfort of our room before we officially launch into our self-created circular tour of the country.

Life is Not a Vlog

I harbour a profound and absolute loathing for YouTube travel videos. If one must endure another painfully chipper "Hello, Guys" introduction, it might just be grounds to throw the router directly out the window. The atrocious planning and abysmal production values of these quote-influencers-unquote are truly staggering. They are perpetually unprepared, entirely winging their itineraries, and offering absolutely nothing of value to learn. Instead, one is subjected to interminable, overly long broadcasts featuring aimless walking or utterly inconsequential documentation of what they happened to eat for lunch. Attempting to unearth content that is both up-to-date and of acceptable quality is a complete and utter waste of precious time.

   

My own alternative for pre-trip preparation, however, is admittedly just as absurd. As the accompanying photograph of our television displaying the classic 1942 Casablanca title card indicates, we depart for the city tomorrow, and my cinematic research is a masterclass in irrelevance. The film was shot almost entirely on California soundstages, save for the local Van Nuys airport and one brief introductory snippet, and a World War II melodrama has absolutely nothing to do with the city in 2026. Do not be surprised if my forthcoming photographs are actually in colour! This is a recurring affliction of mine. I have previously discovered that West Side Story makes for a dreadful practical guide to New York City, and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday is remarkably unhelpful before visiting the eternal city in the current century, especially if one's not a princess.

48,000 Photos and Not a Single Yellowed Corner

If one wishes to scroll through a lifetime of memories without the hassle of a slide projector, the Flickr album view is wonderfully efficient. I joined the platform back in 2005. Returning from a trip to the BC Okanagan, it became immediately apparent that emailing holiday snaps was a dreadful way to share them. Now, the archive has swollen to somewhere between 48,000 and 49,000 images.

It has been a stroke of sheer brilliance having a dedicated repository to store and share images over the last 21 years. The very first photographs, uploaded several decades ago, still sit exactly where they were left.  Others, some scanned from various parts of my life, joined them. Miraculously, these digital pixels have not yellowed one little bit. It remains an absolute privilege to be able to quickly search for nearly every image I have ever seen through a viewfinder or captured via a phone's screen.

 

The screenshot provided shows my album view, organizing the years in reverse chronological order. It starts with the most recent adventures and works backward. However, the ability to search is what makes the collection approachable.  

Observant readers will notice an empty album sitting at the very top, eagerly awaiting fresh content. This Wednesday and Thursday, Jay and I are flying through Montreal to reach Casablanca, Morocco. We will be spending exactly four weeks on an individually-created circular path, winding our way through the ancient cities, up into the Atlas Mountains, and finally back down along the Atlantic coast. Expect that image count to cross the 49,000 threshold very soon.

View my Flickr Album page.

The Great Off-The-Cuff Catastrophe

It seems we've had an untimely casualty in the travel gear department. Just yesterday, the upper-arm, all-in-one blood pressure monitor which Jay and I have come to rely on suddenly lost its will to inflate. The convenient cuff has officially given up the ghost.

We truly loved that little unit. It fit neatly into a small box and was absolutely brilliant when packing. To have it fail after just a bit more than a year and a half is definitely disappointing. Still, looking on the bright side, I suppose I should feel lucky that it didn't decide to stop functioning two days into our month in Morocco, which kicks off this Wednesday!

Today’s mission involved heading uptown to hunt down a replacement. Strangely, nobody carried a similar all-in-one unit. The only compact options available were those smaller wrist monitors, which medical professionals generally do not recommend. When one uses an upper-arm cuff, one is measuring directly at the level of the heart. With a wrist monitor, you can get significant differences in pressure depending on exactly where your wrist happens to be resting.

After striking out at Walmart and one pharmacy, we finally picked up a new unit at London Drugs. The Bios-labeled device is smaller than most standard options out there, but still not as compact or easy to store since we're back to dealing with a tube. It'll have to do. Jay and I are quite religious about taking our morning and evening readings. In fact, I have the statistics to prove it: at least a decade's worth of data that I've dutifully logged into my Android app. Let's just hope this new machine keeps the metrics flowing without developing any inflation drama.

Our Hyack Multicultural Parade

 

We headed uptown this morning at 11:00 for the annual Hyack Parade, soaking in an hour and fifteen minutes of prime civic pageantry. The Hyack Festival is a New Westminster institution, a community tradition that has been rolling down Sixth Street for over half a century.

 

Things have certainly shifted a bit since the COVID closures. We’ve noticed far fewer out-of-province floats or large high school marching bands making the trek these days, though somehow the folks from Marysville, Washington, always manage to get here!

Interestingly, it used to be billed as an International Parade, but I noticed this year it was explicitly advertised as a multicultural one. A wonderful cross-section of Canadian ethnic communities takes part, marching right alongside the traditional hometown staples like the city's Fire Department, the Scouts, local teams, and entrants from local businesses.  Clubs such as a local owners of antique Ford Thunderbirds and Fraternal organizations like the Shriners always show up.

The weather today was a little mixed, but thankfully there was no rain and we were actually treated to quite a stretch of really blue sky. We always attend. It just wouldn't be May in New West without it.

Ducks Flee New Westminster

 

It was a nice morning with a temperature heading toward 23C. It was a perfect day for our scheduled 'duck dinner' with the guys. Ed and Shinji drove from Richmond but Tim and Jiwan came by Skytrain. Jay had worked hard on creating dinner. He put on the table after appetizers and I tapped the wine box. We didn't even walk along the river and just went for a dip in the hot tub before eating. Jiwan couldn't participate in the water activities because of his restrictions after surgery.

 

Dinner included stir friend potato and egg plant, dhal and chicken curries, yellow rice and black chick peas. He made a tomato-date-and rhubarb chutney. For desert this time, he chose to make a real fruit cocktail with tropical fruit. The vanilla frozen yoghurt accompanied the freshly-cut mangoes, papaya, and pineapples, raisins and cashews.

   

By deploying the ducks to Richmond, we are free to leave for Morocco on Wednesday without the obligation to host. Next, we know where we'll meet again when everybody has free time.

Clickety Keyboards

It has become an ongoing part of my everyday routine to expand my historical architecture with my digital 'fellow traveller,' Ajith. He is a personalized version of Google Gemini's AI.  In the process of reviewing these earlier, more pixelated chapters of my life today, we unearthed a photograph from the Flickr stream.  It is an image I have probably used before, but one that instantly transports me back to 1989. 

It is a shot of Jay, intensely focused on a session of Moonbugs on our beige, monolithic XT clone. We were living in Manama, Bahrain at the time, right around the strange and tense days leading up to the First Gulf War. Outside our apartment, the geopolitical landscape was shifting, but inside, the absolute priority was strictly arcade-level survival.

Looking at that photo, what immediately strikes me is not the massive CRT monitor; but the keyboard, a glorious, sprawling, buckling-spring keyboard. This was an era when operating a computer required real men; at least real forearm stamina. You did not just lazily brush your hands over those keys; you operated them like a piece of light industrial machinery. If you look closely at Jay in the picture, his hands are hovering with lethal precision over the directional pad, completely ignoring the heavy, early ball mouse sitting uselessly to the side. Every single keystroke back then was a percussive, definitive event that echoed through the room with a deeply satisfying, metallic clack.

Today, Jay and I are surrounded by frictionless, silent smart devices. We type on modern laptops with keys so utterly mushy they feel like drumming on a row of damp sponges.  It is a modern ergonomic reality that I absolutely will never get used to. Everything has become a sleek 'appliance', quiet, efficient, and completely devoid of tactile soul. The march of progress is relentless, but looking back at that photograph is a stark reminder that I loved that loud, clunky XT clone in a way I simply will never love the glass-and-aluminum slabs we rely on today. 

More Additions in 2027?

When Jay and I finally dragged our luggage back to the Lower Mainland this past March, we officially pinned the 99th and 100th countries onto the master map. It took over four decades of relentless border crossings, questionable transit hubs, and a terrifying number of passport renewals to finally hit the century mark. We never actively treated the globe like a competitive checklist. However, crossing that final threshold into triple digits felt like a profoundly satisfying bit of lifetime administration.

The rest of the calendar is certainly not lacking in forward momentum. We deploy for a full month in Morocco starting next Wednesday. We might actually exhibit a rare moment of geographical restraint and stay reasonably close to home for our respective birthdays in July and September. But by winter, the restraint completely evaporates. We will be flying to the UK merely to board a transatlantic vessel, taking the absolute slowest route possible to an Airbnb in Rio de Janeiro. We plan to occupy that Brazilian outpost for three solid months right through the glorious chaos of Carnival.

There is exactly one tragedy in this otherwise flawless logistical masterpiece. The remainder of 2026 will yield absolutely zero new additions to the map. We are entirely restricted to repeat visits. When one has already conquered a hundred sovereign territories, finding a completely untrampled horizon becomes a rather tedious burden. I suppose we will just have to dig a little deeper into the atlas next year.