Vacation Interruptus

Following up on my most recent blog post, here’s another slice of true life in the world of Chris.

Today is my wedding anniversary. Eleven years ago today, Isabelle and I tied the knot and have lived truly blessed lives since that day. I am very recognizant of the privileged life that I live, and I am eternally grateful for all of the abundance that I have in my life. But even a privileged life like mine isn’t always perfect, despite what social media may tell you. Here’s the brief rundown of our long-simmering trip to Cape Breton.

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Dink Diaries – Happy Anniversary

As most of you who read my blog posts semi-regularly, my wife and I were celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. Ten years! We had decided on our anniversary plan about nine years ago – an epic two-week trip, along with my brother and his wife, to Disney World. The reasoning being that our anniversary coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Magic Kingdom. Eight years of putting money away week by week so that we would have a nice little nest egg to use for our trip. It was going to be amazeballs.

You can likely guess by the tone that the trip did not occur. Thanks to COVID-19, our plans were quashed. But we would not let this disappointment ruin our big anniversary. Given the travel constraints we faced, we instead opted to do a smaller-scale trip, but a fun one, nonetheless. Rather than head south to Florida, we headed north-west towards Quebec.

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DINK Diaries – Riding the Roads

Over the past few weeks, my wife and I have taken off on a couple of our DINK days. For those who haven’t read any of my previous DINK Diaries posts, it stands for Dual Income, No Kids. Translation? We are carefree, and can just take off to do things on a whim.

DINK Day number one was a random road trip to Fredericton. One of the main reasons for this trip was that we had wanted to go eat at a restaurant that my wife had the pleasure of discovering a few weeks earlier while in town for business. So off we went. We wandered around downtown a bit, hitting up a few of our regular spots. Then came the moment we’d been waiting for – lunch at The Lighthouse by 540.

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Adventures in Old Québec

When you’re given the opportunity to have two days to yourself in Québec City, you take it. Or at least that’s what I did recently.

My wife had flown up earlier in the week on a work-related trip. On Wednesday morning, at the crack of first light, I hopped in the car and started my 7-hour ride to meet up with her.

Fair warning – it’s a slightly longer post.

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And Now for Something Completely Different (for us)

It was a new experience for my wife and I over the last two weeks of August. While we always take vacation during this time of the year (both of our birthdays fall at the end of August, some 5 days apart), it was a bit of a departure for us this time. Firstly, my wife, no longer working in the school system, was relegated to only having a few weeks of vacation to use for the year rather than having the summer off. Secondly, we opted to not take any trips this year for our vacation. This meant that we had two weeks of rest, relaxation and quiet.

And boy did I need it.

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DINKs and Death Cab

Last week, my wife and I took off on a short little getaway vacation to Toronto.  Although only a three-night stay, the fact of traveling to another city, in another province, did a lot of good for both of us. I find that going away forces your brain to realize, “Hey, I’m not at home.  I don’t have to worry about my job, or laundry, or yard work, or anything else.” 

We were in Toronto for a total of 72 hours (landed at 2:30 on Wednesday, took off at 2:30 on Saturday), and got in a total of 50 KM of walking over those 72 hours.  Here’s a quick rundown of our DINK Days.

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DINK Diaries – Weekend Getaway

This will be a new series of posts. My wife and I enjoy our lives as DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids). We love to be able to spontaneously do fun things, take trips, have little getaways and the like. I’ll occasionally blog about some of our DINK days.


One week ago today, Isabelle and I headed off for a nice little weekend getaway. Our Reiki association was having a meeting on Saturday afternoon in Grand Falls, which is about 4 hours away. We opted to make a weekend of it and booked a hotel in Fredericton, the halfway point between the two. As luck would have it though, the highway between Moncton and Fredericton flooded the week we were leaving, meaning we had to make a bit of a detour, adding an hour on the first and last legs of our drive. But we didn’t mind at all! Because all we had ahead of us was a weekend of good eating, relaxation and fun.

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