I wrote this just after I returned to Kitimat from my wedding in New Westminster.
It’s good to go home.
They say you can’t go there, but you can it’s just an exorbitantly expensive flight.
The thing to recognize, is that both you and your home will be different when you get there.
I returned to my home town, New Westminster, to marry the woman I love.
The wedding went well, as I predicted we were married by the end of the day regardless of anything else that went exactly as we planned or not.
The thing that didn’t go well was the traffic.
More than once, while stuck in gridlock at about 2 p.m., I remarked, “If we were in Kitimat we’d be there by now.”
Traffic in Vancouver can be challenging, to the point that Vancouver is the first city in North America to have a radio station that only broadcasts traffic reports.
The traffic was particularly bad due the amount of construction going on on highway one and its approaches.
It wasn’t that bad during the Olympics.
Even on my alternate routes to get from point A to point B, I could find my self sitting in an unusual amount of traffic during what should have been a quiet time of the day.
Rush hour was worse.
Besides the scenery and the people, the other thing I love about Kitimat is it’s five minutes from end to end.
Even if you’ve forgotten you’re supposed to be somewhere, as long as you can just hop in the car, you’ll be there in five minutes.
With luck nobody will notice you were tardy at all.
In what used to be normal traffic I would allot half an hour to get most places, in rush hour I would up it to 45 minutes or an hour.
This time I just assumed everything was going to be an hour.
It was nice to come back to Kitimat and not deal with traffic or line ups.
I hope the economic opportunities for Kitimat work out well for everyone, but remember: with the good comes the bad.
Someday, when Kitimat regains its former glory, remember what it was like to be five minutes from everything, never have to line up at the grocery store, or bank machine.
Enjoy it now, because if things work out the way we all hope they will, you might not be able to get there from here.
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