Was That A Dream Come True
The third dream I checked off my list was visiting Canada in September. This dream had a clear deadline, and I knew I would achieve it at the start of the year because I was a bridesmaid in a wedding up there. It would have taken quite a bit to stop me from being there, so it was pretty much a given that I would achieve it. But this dream certainly looked different than I expected. I am incredibly grateful for the trip and thoroughly enjoyed being there for my friend’s wedding, but I don’t feel like I checked visiting Canada off the list for several reasons.
First of all, I pretty much exclusively fly American Airlines. I have status with them from living in Oklahoma and I wanted to keep it when we moved to Georgia even though I wouldn't be flying as much. Getting the miles for this flight was important to me. However, American Airlines didn’t fly into Wichita, the nearest international airport to the province we needed to be in. So, instead, we flew into Fargo, ND, and took the three-hour drive up to cross the border. This was my first time driving across the border into another country, but what I learned in that process is that driving over the border made it feel like we weren’t really in a new country.
We still had to go through customs, but we never got out of the car. All of the MPH signs changed to KPH, so we did a lot of conversions on the drive. However, despite things looking slightly different, it didn’t feel like we were experiencing a whole new place. It felt more like being in a city we had never been to, which is how we felt in Fargo and how I felt in Chicago.
Also, a wedding is not the same as a vacation, especially one you are in. We flew in the day before the wedding and got there in time for Shabbat dinner. The next morning, I was up with the other bridesmaids to get our nails done and then make the trip out to the venue for rehearsal, which took much longer than anyone anticipated. Then it was wedding day, and I was at the venue from 7 am to 10 pm. We had a goodbye brunch on the last day of our trip and then drove back to North Dakota to fly out first thing the following morning.
It was a packed trip and a lot of fun, but it wasn’t a vacation or an opportunity to visit a new place. My husband and son did some sightseeing while I was tied up with bridesmaid activities, but I didn’t get to see the city. The most touristy things we did as a family were eat poutine at a bar and visit the zoo on the morning of our last day. We just didn’t have the leave available to turn this into a longer trip.
I learned a couple of essential things when setting future dreams. For one thing, I have to fly into a country to feel like I checked it off the list. This may only be an issue for Canada and Mexico since those are the most drivable from my house, but this could also be a factor in traveling across Europe. We drove between Ireland and Northern Ireland when we were there last year, and it didn’t feel like we were going to a new country. Part of that may very well be that the pieces we interacted with mostly read as Ireland regardless of which side of the border we were on, but it could also be that driving from Italy to Germany or France doesn’t feel like seeing multiple countries. It’s just something to remember when planning these trips, and while it may not be a significant distinction, those things matter when it comes to feeling like a dream has come true.
I also learned that trying to check off a dream while attending a significant event may not be the best strategy. We have a wedding in Mexico in May of next year. We are on the fence about extending the trip or not to see some sights, and a big piece of that will come down to how much leave we have to spend. That wedding will be a different story because we aren’t playing an active role in it, and we won’t be bringing our son, so the vacation aspects of a trip will be more available to us in Mexico than they were in Canada. But that’s also a family wedding so it will involve more family time. Mexico has never really been on my dream list outside of spending time at resorts, which is what we’ll be doing, so it may very well feel like a dream come true, but that will be because my expectations and goals are different.
If my dream for this year were to be part of my dear friend’s wedding, I would have achieved that in every possible definition of the word. But the dream I wrote down was to visit Canada, and while I have technically checked that off the list, it doesn’t really feel like it. Dreaming is a learning process, and it's okay if we get to a place and realize that this isn’t what we wanted or how we wanted it. We just dream again. We are all on a journey and figuring things out as we go, and that’s part of the fun. If you find yourself at a finish line that doesn’t feel the way you wanted, give yourself some grace and start the race again because now you know more about what victory is supposed to be in your life.