By Mark Buckshon
As you read this, I likely will be somewhere in eastern Bulgaria or southern Romania on a bicycle, peddling between remote rural communities with unpronounceable names. My wife Vivian is joining me for the overseas adventure, but since she doesn’t bike, she’ll spend some time in Sofia and meet up again with me about 10 days later in Bucharest.
Certainly this experience will take me a long ways from home, both geographically and culturally, but getting there and communicating will be simple processes. A day before the Turkish Airlines flight takes us from Istanbul to Varna, we’ll be at Ottawa’s airport, waiting for our flight to Newark and the much longer flight to Istanbul.
I’m old enough to appreciate that this sort of independent travel would have been unimaginable during the Cold War, though I suppose (especially when we get to Romania) we are getting relatively close to the new hot war between Russia and Ukraine.
In Bucharest, I’ll trade rural inns for a few days at the Intercontinental Hotel, in a building that held much intrigue during the Communist era (and its dramatic collapse in the 1980s). We’ll have lunch with the company’s remote administrative assistant, who is paid very well by Romanian standards but I fear would get us in trouble with Ontario’s minimum wage regulations if she worked here.
I truly count my blessings that we have the health, resources, freedom and opportunity to experience another part of the world.
Mark Buckshon can be reached at bu******@cn***.com.
