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Category: Canada

  • Home. / Paris.

    Home. / Paris.

    Happy New Year

    Hey there, it’s been a minute. Sorry, my bad. When I started up my travels again, I had every intention of keeping the blog going, but the further I went without writing an entry, the more it felt like I would never be able to catch up. So I decided to concentrate on doing the traveling part and handle the blogging part later. Well, now it’s later.

    I’ve left Europe behind. I used up 86 of the 90 days I was allowed to remain in the EU. I write to you now from my apartment in Bangkok, Thailand, where I’m looking forward to taking a break from traveling for the next month or so. And now that I’ve got some time to myself to sit and think, I figured I should let you know what I’ve been up to.

    Home. — Devon/Edmonton/Calgary — Sept. 4 – Oct. 26

    To start off, a quick update on my mom. She’s doing well, considering the circumstances. She’s responded well to the chemotherapy and the leukemia has officially been in remission since October. However, she still has a long road to go. She’s currently in the intensification phase of the chemo process. Her doses have been higher and the impacts on her day to day life are greater. Despite this, she holds a positive outlook and is proceeding through her treatment with as much strength and optimism as she can muster.

    I returned home from the first portion of my trip in early September, while Mom was still in the hospital and the path forward was not quite as clear. It’s hard to remember exactly what I was feeling in those times. I do remember seeing the ups and downs that Mom was experiencing. How she could have so much strength and energy one day, only to be completely drained the following day. I, also, remember that things started to feel less scary once I was back home and could see what exactly was going on, hear what her doctors and nurses had to say, and especially when the outline of her treatment began to clarify. I can’t fathom how my imagination would have run away with me if I continued to travel through this period. I don’t regret coming home even a little bit.

    Once Mom returned from the hospital in mid-September, September and October were relatively quiet months. I settled in to routines and more normal life. Walking the dog, driving Mom in to Edmonton for her appointments, running errands. We were waiting to understand what Mom’s outpatient treatment would look like, how hard it would impact her and how her and Shawn would be able to adjust to the schedule if I weren’t around to help out. So in the meantime, we just waited while time passed.

    For my part, I spent some time exploring Edmonton, especially around the river valley and the Whitemud Ravine. I made a trip back home to Calgary for a few days to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday and catch up with some friends. I also spent a lot of time in the forested ravine in Devon, particularly in the early evening and oftentimes in the dark, as the sun started to set earlier and earlier. As you’ll see from my photos, I spent plenty of time outdoors, watching the summer fade into fall.

    I also spent October participating in Inktober, with my friends Amy and Nikki. Each day of October, we drew a picture based on that day’s prompt word. I added an additional challenge for myself in that I wanted each drawing to feature ants (the insects) in some way or another (it’s a long story, suffice it to say they’d been on my mind a lot).

    Mom handled the first few of outpatient treatments relatively well, despite a fairly rigorous schedule necessitating a lumbar puncture once every five days, as well as IV and oral chemo treatments. And soon, we got what appeared to be good news, she would be moving schedule that would only require treatment at the hospital once every three weeks. This was a schedule that her and Shawn would be able to manage on their own. We would soon come to learn that this was actually the beginning of the intensification phase, but for the time being it appeared that this was good news and that I would be able to return to my travels.

    And so, I booked a flight. Swapped out some items in my bags where necessary (I was still living out of the same two backpacks as when I was traveling, as all of my other possessions were locked away in storage in Calgary). Before I knew it, I was back on my way. Reversing the trip that I had made a month and a half earlier, Edmonton to Calgary, Calgary to Paris.

    Paris. — Oct. 27 – Oct. 30

    Paris is the one city on my trip that I had visited before. Albeit, it was only a day trip, while I was visiting London back in 2012. That day had not left a good impression of Paris in mind, though that was largely my own fault. I planned to see too many things for the time that I had. The day was overcast and smoggy and I spent half of the morning with a contact lens stuck under my eyelid after rubbing my eye, absentmindedly. Oh, and I got scammed out of some €13 in two completely separate events (a clipboard charity scam and a friendship bracelet scam, IYKYK). I was naive and much more inexperienced, both in life and travel.

    Over a decade later, I was ready for Paris to redeem itself. The City of Lights and Love must have such a reputation for a reason, after all. That said, I also wasn’t giving it much of an opportunity. Paris was just a way station for my ultimate destination in Stuttgart, Germany. I was intending to visit my new friend, Rosa, and Paris was just a place to work off my jet-leg and readjust to travel/European living.

    I hoped to spend a least a day at the Louvre. I was determined not to miss it as I had when I booked my first trip. The first time around, I didn’t know that the Louvre is, famously, closed on Tuesdays. And so booked my train to Paris for a Tuesday. Of course, now I know this was a kind of blessing given how frantic that day turned out to be.

    However, fate seems to have decided that it’s probably better if I didn’t enter the Louvre. You see, the week prior to my short time in Paris, the Louvre was robbed. I’m sure you’ve heard about the brazen, daylight theft of eight of the French Crown Jewels. As a result, the museum was closed for the week following the heist. My first full day in Paris was a Tuesday, so I already knew that was out of the question. But I had hoped Wednesday would be my day. It even could have been my day, as it was also the day that the Louvre would reopen to the public. But, now there was an entire city full of tourists that had been denied entry to one of the major attractions for over 10 days. Visitation was to be by reservation only, and, to no one’s surprise, tickets evaporated immediately. So, it seems, I’m just not meant for the Louvre. Maybe next decade.

    Without the Louvre to occupy a day, I still managed to find plenty to do. I spent a day revisiting some of the sights that I saw on my trip — Sacre-Coeur Basilica, the Opera Garnier, the courtyard of the Louvre, the Jardin Tuileries, several Ponts (bridges) over the Seine, and Notre Dame Cathedral). I wandered freely through the centre of the city, stopping at a boulangerie for lunch.

    I remember feeling a little melancholy, though I don’t think I could really tell you why. Maybe the jetlag, maybe a bit of anxiety about being back on the road after a couple of months of relative comfort. Maybe a bit Paris itself. I found the parts of the city not immediately adjacent to the river to be suffocating. Tall buildings surrounded narrow streets, blocking the already sparse sunlight and reducing the sky to thin strips above my head. A huge contrast to a few days prior when the wholeness of the sky stretched out over Albertan prairies.

    My next day was spent exploring a couple of museums: the National Picasso Museum and the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art (not to be confused with the National Museum of Modern Art at Centre Pompidou). Picasso became one of my favorite artists when I visited London in 2012 and saw the Vollard Suite, as it was display for the first time in the British Museum. He always seems to make an appearance in some way or another when I travel. A testament to his prolificity, to be sure. But, I also feel a connection to his strange mind, the way that he saw and represented the world with simple lines and colors. I always enjoy my time with his works, wherever I find them.

    The Picasso Museum is located in the Marais district, known for its art galleries and clothing boutiques. It was a very cool area to walk around. And really opened my eyes to how diverse the different arrondisments of Paris could be. Marais was a complete change from where I was staying in Montmartre. In fact, my overall impression of Paris from this trip is just how big of a city it really is. In my mind, because I was able to walk between all the big sights, it felt relatively compact. But in reality, using the metro to get around, I started to feel more of the size of Paris. And understanding that it’s not really a place that can be taken in at a single glance. It would take a real depth of exploration to find the good and the bad and the in between. So, I resolved that Paris is simply too big to be any single thing. Which I’m sure is true of every place, but it’s especially noticeable in the bigger cities that I’ve visited, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Bangkok.

    I enjoyed my time with the museums and left them as I usually do, exhausted and hungry. The Museum of Modern Art was directly across the river from the Eiffel Tower, so I made a quick trip to the foot of the tower before a tidal wave of tourists, punters, peddlers and scammers had me quickly on my way. Off to find another boulangerie and the croque monsieur and mille feuille that were waiting for me.

    The following day, I set off to Stuttgart aboard a high speed train that carried me away from France and into Germany. And that’s where I’ll leave you for you now.

    What’s Next?

    As I mentioned, I’m in Bangkok for the majority of January. So I’m going to try to get caught up on these blogs over the course of those few weeks. And I’ll also try to get out and enjoy Bangkok a little too, I guess. Though honestly, it’s been nice over the past week to not feel like a tourist all of the time.

  • Where I’m coming from.

    Where I’m coming from.

    My path towards this journey is not an uncommon one. I find myself in my mid-30s adrift without a meaningful purpose to direct my life. I spent my 20s working to establish my career as a software developer and building a relationship with a partner. But as I entered my 30s, my relationship was coming to an end, and programming was starting to lose the magic that it had held for me in my earlier years. More and more, each year seemed to resemble the one before, familiar patterns and cycles that held me in their sway.

    I suppose the story starts with the COVID pandemic in 2020. Just a few months prior to the initial two week shutdown, my partner and I split. It was largely amicably, thankfully, as we owned a home together, in which we would continue to live in for the next year and a half as we waited for the world to return a bit more to normal. Through this difficult period, we each tried to live our own lives as much as possible, pursuing new relationships and finding hobbies to keep us busy.

    It was during this period that I first began to explore the world around me. It started with long walks on winter nights. The streets, already left vacant by the pandemic, were absolutely desolate in -20°C temperatures. I had the place entirely to myself. I started wandering my community and the surrounding areas. What started as a way to get out of the confines of my house and get some light exercise blossomed into a new wonder as I started to appreciate nature in a way that I never had before. I spent hours finding the nooks and crannies of Fish Creek Provincial Park, beautiful even in its frozen state.

    Eventually, as both winter and the world began to thaw, it was time to start moving on with life. I found a new apartment, in a new part of the city, and had a new world to discover. For the next 4 years, this apartment would be my home base as I expanded my horizons and began to catalogue the various beautiful sights the city had to offer. This renewed a long slumbering interest in photography that had resided in me since I was a teenager and culminated in a small Instagram page where I uploaded my various discoveries, @walkingyyc.

    At the same time that exploring and photography were starting to take on increased prominence in my life, I was developing another hobby that had taken root during the pandemic, drawing. I had doodled on and off for years, and had picked up some of the basics from online courses and videos. But it wasn’t until the pandemic forced us all inside that I had time and space to dedicate to honing my skills. I, again, took to Instagram to document my progress, seeking to capture the learning process (@brandon.lefaivre). I leaned towards pen and paper as my medium initially, before starting to expand to paint and experimenting with pencil. Much of my work leaned into the abstract, starting as simple doodles and growing increasingly complex as I added detail and texture. Over time, my representational skill continued to grow, as I became more confident reflecting reality in my drawings.

    Years passed and eventually the things that had been new and exciting about my city began to become familiar and comfortable. I knew all of the good places and when the best times to be there were. So I put this knowledge to use, along with some new toys. I picked up a Nikon Coolpix P1000 camera, famous for it’s incredible zoom capabilities and began playing my own version of Pokemon Go, photographing birds.

    As I went about filling my life list with new birds, I went further and further afield to find my feathery subjects. Eventually, I was leaving the confines of the city to go set up a tripod on the prairies or in the foothills hoping for a new sight to come along. I began to dream of back/bike-packing throughout the province trying to check off every bird in my copy of Birds of Alberta.

    These escapes filled my weekends, but they didn’t fully inure me from the day to day monotonies of life. The work that I had once found so exciting and interesting, was increasingly becoming a drag. A foray into the world of online dating proved unfruitful, anxiety inducing and depressing. A bleak period of restlessness and dissatisfaction followed. It was in this period that the seed of an idea began to germinate.

    Like most people, I had always daydreamed of leaving everything behind to travel the world. However, unlike many people, I found myself in the fortunate position where I might actually be able to make it happen. With no partner, no children, no property, an established career that I would be able to jump back into, and enough savings to last me a while with some prudent budgeting. On paper, everything looked good. There was only one thing that I would need to do to make it happen. The scariest thing. Decide to do it.

    It took me a couple of months of turning it over in my head. Debating the pros and cons. Wondering what could really come from it. Questioning whether it would prove to be disastrous. Am I suited for that kind of life? Do I have the temperament to deal with the frustrations, anxieties, and insecurities? I still don’t know the answers to those questions. But, I decided there was only one way to find out.

    As may be evident by this point, I’m an overthinker and a planner, despite my protestations for the latter charge. So in January, I gave a full 6 months notice for my plans to leave to my manager. I wound down all of the my existing projects (though some stubbornly persisted right up until the last minute), planned training and continuity sessions for my old projects and maintenance work, and finally said goodbye to my coworkers.

    For the last month, I have been busy preparing for the trip. Planning what to bring, packing up my apartment, and moving everything into storage. But, I’ve also already begun having fun. My sister was married, in Invermere at the beginning of the month, to a wonderful man in a beautiful location (including an arrival of the bride by helicopter!). I got a quick back-country camping trip in with some friends at the Skoki Loop in Banff. And another car-camping trip over a rainy weekend at our friend’s family property near Pigeon Lake, featuring their newly completed and freshly mosaic-ed pizza oven.

    And now, here we are. Less than a week from the beginning of my adventure. I’ve spent the last week with friends and family, enjoying as much of their company as I can before I take my first steps. I have a ticket booked for Amsterdam and accommodations for a week, but after that, the road is wide open. Let’s see where it takes us!

  • This is where it starts.

    This is where it starts.

    I’m going on a trip. I don’t know exactly where, and I don’t know for exactly how long. I’m making it up as I go, but one thing is for certain, and it’s that I’m going on a trip. I have left my job, I will be packing up my belongings and moving them into storage, saying goodbye to my family and friends, strapping on a backpack and going on a trip.

    This website and blog will be the letters that I write for back home. And for the people that I meet along the way that want to keep track of me. As with everything with this trip, I’m not exactly sure how I’ll use it and I expect that it will evolve as I go. For now, I plan to share my experiences, photos, drawings and whatever thoughts that feel worth sharing. So come along with me, let’s see where the road takes us.

    The journey begins August 6th, 2025.