Wise Woman Travel

After an afternoon spent wandering the shops of Positano, a quaint little cliffside village on the Amalfi Coast, I’m sitting at a cafe table, sipping red wine, the day’s ambient heat radiating up from the cobblestones. The sun is just beginning to set, tingeing the turquoise Mediterranean candy floss pink.

Ya, right. My mom always told me I had a great imagination.

Well, the research it took to write that paragraph was fun, anyway. And maybe someday, I’ll visit the Amalfi Coast in person.

But not this year, and maybe not the year after that either. This “lost summer,”as one journalist I recently read calls it, will see me spending my time close to home. That wouldn’t usually be so bad because my hometown of Edmonton has become famous worldwide for its summer festivals. Traditionally, they start in mid-June and follow one after the other to the September long weekend, like so many excited kids lined up for a turn on the water slide.

Again, not this year.

Dreams of the Amalfi Coast aside, I realized a number of weeks ago that it was becoming urgent to unleash my imagination on this summer of no travel.  I dread the thought of heading into another long prairie winter without July and August memories. So, with the help of some of my equally inventive, restless friends, we began to concoct plans for tiny treks and travels, touring parts of Edmonton and a few nearby spots where we’d never or rarely visited.

Watch this space to eavesdrop on our travels. Tell me in the comment section how you’re turning your own lost summer into one to remember.

As a colleague of mine who researches hope told me, “It’s not that we can’t have adventures this summer. They just have to be little adventures.”