Hither and/or yon

There's no place like... where are we?

If we’re goin’, we’re goin’. Let’s go!

~ Easy Rider (1969)

IT’S ONE OF THE UGLIER portmanteau words but, reluctant as I am to use it, Lesley and I appear to be in the throes of what has come to be called a staycation.

Neither here nor there, you might say.

We mostly take day trips by public transit, seldom venturing far enough not to be able to return in the evening to our own front door.

Or we simply go for a walk. It may not be Paris, but Toronto has some lovely sidewalk cafés.

Even wandering across the U of T’s downtown campus can have pleasurably rural overtones.

For jaunts farther afield, we use a car-sharing service — quicker, cheaper and easier than a conventional rental.

It’s called Communauto and, though their rules permit it, I’d think twice about driving one into the US.

It’s already dICEy enough trying to cross the border, and I’m not sure how well a name beginning with “Commun” might play in a country where I’ve heard Canada’s socialized medicine referred to as “socialist medicine.”

Not that there’d be anything wrong with that.

Anyway, the close-to-home experience has proved curiously satisfying, which is odd for us.

In past years, we’ve usually managed at least two trips out of the country. Certainly always one. Mostly to Europe, but as far afield as China and Australia.

Something may still come up in the fall — we’ve seldom done our travelling in the summer — but so far the spirit hasn’t moved us. Or our spirits haven’t been called upon to move.

We were in Mexico City for my birthday last year. My second time there and Lesley’s first. We liked it very much.

And then we went to Rome in November, one of our favourite cities, staying for the first time in the Garbatella neighbourhood, which attracts relatively few tourists.

They don’t (thank goodness) know what they’re missing. It is a truly wonderful quarter. I think we only made the effort twice to go into central Rome.

We felt so comfortable in Garbatella, we were tempted to go again this year.

But for one large, ugly, overcrowded “but…”

2025 is a holy jubilee year, which brings countless visitors to Rome — on top of the countless visitors who would already be there — seeking spiritual renewal and perhaps a plenary indulgence or two. You never know when they might come in handy.

Even Garbatella is likely to be grim with pilgrims, not only filling up the restaurants but driving up the price of accommodation. Airfares have gone sky-high, too.

Which means this year home has been where the heart is.

With a population including more than 250 ethnic groups — overall, Caucasians are in the minority — and 180 languages spoken, Toronto has a strong claim to being the world’s most cosmopolitan and multicultural city.

Among other things, we have three separate and distinct Chinatowns.

So we’ve been globetrotting around the metropolitan area and southern Ontario, peering at this, admiring that and pooh-poohing anything that didn’t meet our standards.

Having, I must admit, a high old time.

Near or far, there’s no one I’d rather travel with than Lesley. But at least on these jaunts, I don’t need her linguistic skills to translate for me.

I have a good enough grasp on English to cope with most situations.

We did the Communauto thing for a couple of days to visit our friend David’s mid-19^th century, work-in-progress farmhouse out in the country about 170 kilometres to the northwest.

He lives there with his two Scottish deerhounds, huge ungainly beasts…

…until they’re outside, accelerating like Ferraris and making you SO glad you’re not a stag.

We saw some wilder life, too, including a killdeer – a large variety of plover – doing amateur theatrics. Something I’d read about but never seen.

Killdeers are ground nesters, and we were obviously too close to this one’s home, hearth and family. He started to limp slowly away from us, dragging one wing as if it were broken.

A predator – we’re not, or at least not at that moment – would seize upon this and go after him. At which point, possibly squawking nyah, nyah, nyah, he’d fly off, having led the hunter away from his nearest and dearest.

Fascinating to watch. And, killdeer being a protected species and reportedly not very tasty, he was safe enough from us.

A pheasant or a grouse, now…

(Wait a second, though. Didn’t Sebastian Flyte and his aesthete friends at Oxford chow down on plovers’ eggs — "Mummy sends them… They always lay early for her" — in Brideshead Revisited?

Maybe we should have tried to figure out where the killdeer was limping from and looked for the nest in that direction.)

Other excitement, too. We knew there were thunderstorms passing through but then our phones went off like laryngitic banshees.

A tornado warning. Our first. We tend not to get whirlwinds in downtown Toronto. At least not the natural-disaster kind.

This one proved to be a non-starter. The thunderstorms were a bit of a bust, too.

And so the summer passes amiably.

We have a commuter-train trip west along the lakeshore coming up for lunch with a former workmate and his wife in the pretty little town where they live.

Followed by a ferry ride (or, if they’re overcrowded, as they often are, water taxi) to the Toronto islands for lunch with two other friends.

And sooner or later, the heatwave may relent a little to make it comfortable enough to barbecue and eat dinner in the backyard.

I dunno, though. That may not happen until September.

For now, I’m playing on another piece of familiar ground — my love of anagrams.

Sonata City (apparently a big deal in the Pokemon Insurgence game, whatever that is), satiny coat, satanic toy… They all add up to the same thing:

Staycation.

For want of a better word.