The first couple of months after moving into the condo, I lived and breathed this room. Because I didn't really have much furniture yet, I slept, ate, lounged, and worked on a twin air mattress. This room has been nothing if not an exercise in patience, with the last major puzzle piece finally coming together over two years after I moved in.

Tuscany has always conjured up romantic images of golden-hued landscapes, with its rolling hills and cypress-lined roads. I had a mind to just jump in a car and drive--see what we stumbled across. As a result, I put much less planning into this portion of our Italian adventure than the Dolomites, taking a more on-the-fly sort of approach.

Our final stop in Italy was the famed Cinque Terre ("Five Lands"), part of the Cinque Terre National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), along the northwest coast of Italy. These clusters of brightly-coloured villages, seemingly tumbling down the hillside into the Ligurian Sea, have so captured the imagination of travellers around the world that it should have been no surprise to find these destinations to be extremely busy.

There has always been a kind of magic to Venice, this floating city on the Adriatic Sea, built on over 100 little islands. Its unique appeal, perhaps unsurprisingly, has led to a real overtourism problem–over 20 million people visit every year (half of which are day trippers from cruise ships and the like), and indeed multiple friends warned me off Venice to avoid the throngs of tourists.

Three seems to be a magic number. Three Musketeers. Three Stooges. Three Men and a Baby. So perhaps it is no surprise that this trio of mountain peaks, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, is such a popular spot in the Dolomites. In fact, I seem to have a penchant for triple mountain towers, as hiking to see the Torres del Paine for sunrise was the impetus for my trip to Chile.

One of my bucket list items while in the Dolomites was to hike the Gran Cir Via Ferrata at Passo Gardena. Via ferrata literally translates in Italian as “iron path”, which are protected climbing routes found in the Alps involving steel cables, rungs, or ladders secured to the rock face, to which climbers would typically affix harnesses.

It was only a short drive from the Alpe di Siusi to what would be our base for 3 days, Ortisei, the main village of the Val Gardena. Fun fact for the linguists: the majority language in the area is actually Ladin, a Romance language which is now the officially recognized language in South Tyrol. This charming town of just under 5000 people had everything we needed and was centrally-located, serving as a good jumping-off point for the region.

Alpe di Siusi (or Seiser Alm, as it’s called in German) is a Dolomite plateau, considered the largest high-altitude Alpine meadow in Europe. As part of the Dolomites, it’s been classified as an UNESCO World Heritage site. It was to be our first stop in our tour of the Italian Dolomites. This epic mountain range, which was the impetus for my originally-planned trip to Italy in 2020 (which went awry due to world events), is located in South Tyrol, the northernmost province in Italy.

My love of dance has always been rooted in the act of dancing itself…actually physically moving my body through space, contorting it into sequences of what are hopefully somewhat aesthetically-pleasing shapes. The incredible mental focus and clarity that comes from dancing, where everything else in my life falls away, and it is just about the next movement, the next rhythmic touchpoint in the music. That will always be at the root of what drives my love of dance; however, I’ve been reflecting of late on the evolution of that love to include something I hadn’t expected: creating my own choreography.

I’ve always hated running. Vivid, wheezing memories of running 4-lap tests around the sandy, high school track at Cariboo Hill will forever be seared into my subconscious. It was something that I so loathed growing up, that it was a real victory to enter into adulthood, with all the freedom of choice that entails, and leave the unwanted remnants of any kind of running hobby behind on that sandy track. Given all of that, I admit to being a bit daunted and perplexed to find myself, twenty years later, voluntarily signed up to run a half-marathon.

After my 2-day sojourn on the eastern coast of Newfoundland, I flew to Gander and rented a car to make the 3.5-hour drive west. I spent one night in Corner Brook, but for the majority of my time, I was based in the small town of Rocky Harbour. In addition to my big hiking day at Western Brook Pond, I was eager to explore the other trails and sights that Gros Morne National Park and the surrounding area had to offer.

The entire impetus for my trip to Newfoundland started with Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park, and ultimately that insane view looking down into the gorge. I knew I wanted to experience that for myself and set about finding out how to make that happen. It turns out that the only way to get there is to book a guided hike, which will run you about $300 CAD. This includes the boat ride across the “pond” and taking you up the backcountry trail to the ridge overlooking the gorge.