Surrey, BC

North Surrey Secondary School

Run Time: 56:57 + 2-minute kick

Surrey is not the garden spot of Canada. At least, I hope it isn’t. There were quite a few homeless people on the main road I took from my last sales visit of the day to the hotel. Also, parts of the town remind me of the car you haven’t washed since before winter even though it is now well into spring. This is in contrast to Regina, which I visited earlier in the month, and I genuinely didn’t recognize the same area I had stayed at when I was there in January. It was sparkly clean and picturesque.

I needed to go for a run. We have been working on the new house on weekends, so my running at home has been restricted. I have also done some random travel, in addition to my normal work travel, and I have more scheduled in the near future, which removes more days from the running calendar, so I just got on the nearest sidewalk and ran the direction opposite of the homeless people, and I came across a school track. There was soccer practice going on, and some kind of running practice, but I kept to the outside lane and it was glorious.

The problem with traveling to Canada is the disruption of ritual. I have been rewatching “The West Wing” on HBO Max, and I am currently in Season 4. In the evenings, in the hotel, when I am all caught up for the night on work, I will watch an episode or two. EXCEPT when I am in Canada, where I can finish the partial episode I started in the U.S. the night before, and then I am banned from watching more episodes. It is, after all, a show about the U.S. Capitol. Canada is clearly jealous that they have no corresponding award-winning show, maybe called, “The North Hallway.”

The other problem is not having a safe data plan for my cell phones, so I shut down the data when I cross over, which disables the mapping app. So now I am navigating like we did back in the day, by signage and compass. On one trip I printed out mapquest directions. Now I screenshot detailed map directions ahead of time. That seems to work okay, until you pass a turn or think you did. Occasionally I will turn on the data on my work phone to recalibrate. And finally, I like to listen to podcasts and music, switching back and forth in the car, but without data, no Apple Music, so it’s all podcasts, all the time. No balance. No bueno.

These are all minor inconveniences, and I am Canada-friendly, I swear. Hockey is one of my favorite sports, I like the socialist policies they have, and I want the option to move there if Trump is not put in prison soon. I don’t particularly like the real winter they have, but I could deal with it if I had to. I actually would prefer if there were no countries, if it were just one big world government, no borders, HBO Max the same everywhere, one big global data plan. Imagine there’s no countries. It’s easy if you can.