Storyline: Road Trip with Milan 2018
This road trip was quite emotional for me. It was dedicated to my best childhood friend who left us way too young 20 years ago. With this trip, her widowed husband Milan has now fulfilled her dream to travel with me to new places in the world.
The next few posts in the “Road Trip with Milan 2018” will be following us through our journey.
May 31, 2018
A week after coming back from our 6 weeks in Europe the car is packed and ready for a road trip. This time we’ll be driving around Ontario and Quebec with an old Bulgarian friend of mine. It is a special and somewhat emotional trip. It will be 20 years in August since Dora, his wife and my best childhood friend, passed away.
Sometimes inexplicable things happen. Things derail the path of logic. I remember that day vividly with an event that neither I nor others could comprehend. But it is exactly what happened. My friend Erwin and I were on a road trip along the north shore of the St. Lawrence river. Walking by the church of Baie-Saint-Paul after visiting the Gallery of Contemporary Art across from it, I felt the urge to enter and light a candle. So, I did, surprising Erwin and myself. I had no idea where this sudden urge came from. I just had to do it. I was sad and quiet for the rest of the day. A week later, after completing our journey and back home in Toronto I called Dora in Sofia. “Can I talk to your mom”, I asked her son. “There is no mom anymore”, he replied. It felt like lightning striking my body. At the age of 44 leaving 2 young children, she had passed away the very day I felt the need to light a candle in the church. There was no logic or explanation for what I felt and did then. After some time, I wrote two poems in my primitive English (after all I had been in Canada for only about three years then) and one in Bulgarian, and sent them to Milan.
When I left Bulgaria, I took a dream with me. I thought that one day I’d buy an old campervan, take my two girl-friends and drive around the world with them. One of them left this world very young. The other? My Bulgarian friends, or what’s left of them don’t do that well. They are aging way too fast. Some are leaving this world way too early. Vanya, my university friend, carries the world on her shoulders. She had to take care of her mom suffering from Alzheimer’s, and is taking care of her younger brother who is paralyzed by stroke and her husband who has had a quadruple bypass, suffers congestive heart failure and has given up, placing an even greater burden on his family. There are no care facilities in Bulgaria. All lies in the hands of the family, in this case in the hands of my friend.
And so, my dream was not to be. The only one who is still standing tall (and boy, he is really tall) is Milan. Once the Canadian visa requirement for Bulgarians was lifted we decided it was time for him to visit us.
Thus, this road trip that will take us along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River to Baie-St-Paul and beyond to the Saguenay River, crossing the Réserve Faunique Ashuapmushuan, to Chapais, and staying north, traveling west through Amos QC, Timmins ON all the way to the north of Lake Superior Provincial Park.
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