HOLY DAYS
Reflections of a Travel Pilgrim
What makes a good holiday and how do you become a Holy Day Maker? How do you travel well — and can you travel without leaving home? How can you extend the life of your holiday?
This little travel companion examines these and other holiday matters in the hope that it will help the reader, as it helped your host, the writer, to clarify her thoughts on the subject, assisting those of us who want to make the most of our time “off” and who want to carry the Holy Day spirit with us for as long as we may.
“May we all learn to be travel pilgrims!”
—Dicken Bettinger, ed.d., co-author of Coming Home: Uncovering the Foundations of Psychological Well-Being
The author started travelling young, on a family holiday to France when she was three. A vaguely remembered glimpse of a black wrought-iron balcony and the Mediterranean blue beyond may be fantasy rather than memory. Family hiking holidays in the French Alps awakened her love for the mountains. Her first solo trip and flight was when she was twelve, to be met in Geneva by a French family with whom she spent the next three weeks, in theory to learn the language and in practice to taste the subtly, indescribably different ways in which we live our lives.
Since then she has travelled for fun, for adventure, for education, for work and for love.
She spent the first thirteen years of her life in England before moving to Montréal, Canada, with her family. She completed high school and then spent two and a half years in Switzerland. After attending two universities in Ontario, she returned once more to the UK for a master’s degree in literature. She lived in Ontario and in British Columbia for six years then came back to Montréal where she completed a degree and a half in Social Work. After all this travelling around she moved back to England where she stayed still for nearly six years before meeting a special Swedish someone on a beach in the Canary Islands. They moved to Spain and ran a small hotel in the Picos de Europa Mountains in northern Spain for thirteen years. From there they emigrated back to British Columbia with their sons, and she began a program for the local school district called “Connecting Generations.”
Sarah has moved between continents three times, between countries four times and she has lived in four different Canadian provinces. During the pandemic, she drove across the country. She currently resides in Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast of Canada where she has opened a b&b.
Despite suffering from car sickness as a child, she continues to find stillness in motion. She is grateful for the many opportunities she has had to experience the diversity of life and see the unchanging thread that connects our differences.
If you are not feeling giddy and would still like to know more, please contact Sarah at sarah@thebirdinhand.ca