“West of Edmonton and running north-south for more than 300
miles, Banff, Jasper, and Yoho national parks combine with several smaller
parks to form the Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, one of the largest
protected areas in the world.”
When COVID closed the border in 2020, my plan to road trip
through Canada was put on hold. Instead,
I hunkered down in an Airbnb and isolated trying to avoid getting sick and trying to avoid getting anyone else sick.
Once a vaccine became available, I got the jab the minute I
qualified. I have a fascination with immunology, epidemiology, infectious
disease, and have long-followed experts in these fields on social media. I know RNA vaccines had been in development
for a long time and I knew they were all saying the same thing… Safe.
Effective. We can go back to normal. So,
of course, I got the shot.
Quick side-note, at work I was hiring a new person on the
team and one applicant was clearly not a good fit for the job, but he’d worked
for USAMRIID. I was discussing the folks I wanted to interview with my director
and our conversation about this candidate went something like this:
Her: He’s not a great fit for the position.
Me: I know, but he worked for USAMRIID.
Her: I don’t know what that is.
Me: Uh, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases.
Her: (chuckling) Now it makes sense. You know you can’t interview and just talk
about that, right?
Me: (sighing in resignation) I know, but I really want to.
Anyhow, when Canada announced that it would reopen it’s
borders to Americans who were fully vaxxed and tested negative I started
thinking about how I could safely go and how much I could really get done.
I’d already paid for an Airbnb in College Station through
August, and committed to dog-sitting Lady-bug, the first week of
September. I knew I wanted to be out of
Canada before winter threatened, and that narrowed down my time-frame quite a
bit. But being in Utah would put me just
south of Calgary and it seemed do-able to complete the Western Canada portion
of my list.
