This being Canada, it’s not entirely impossible that summer already happened and you missed it. There was that Saturday a few weeks back where you slept in till midday. Maybe summer happened that morning and you slept through the whole thing? Perhaps that week you spent with your cousin up north (I mean, further up north) was the one where everyone hit the beach and bought ice cream and you missed it because the only beach you could find that wasn’t frozen had a polar bear on it and the ice cream was so cold you could only heat it after some serious hard labor involving a chisel and a blowtorch. Maybe.

Let’s take a serious perspective for a moment and imagine that, despite its latitude, maybe Canada does have a summer and also that despite the awesome summer Canada totally has, we live in the era of cheap airline tickets so you can just go somewhere with a real summer during the Canadian summer. Somewhere without polar bears.

You might, however, still need some last minute vacation deals when you throw open the curtains and realise that, yes, it’s going to be summer for at least the next twenty minutes and, no, you haven’t booked anything yet. Clearly, you need some pretty quick internet access. Already, dudes outside are running by in beach shorts, toting surfboards. Panicking slightly, you try and find your phone, knowing without a doubt that it’s down the back of a couch. But which one? You haven’t used your laptop in months, ever since the lid froze shut, and you don’t have time to install the hundreds of updates it’ll demand before it’ll function properly now it’s finally thawed. The smell of barbecue drifts through the windows as you tip the couch over, your desperation lending you the strength of the Hulk. Finally, among the discarded candy wrappers, miscellaneous bits of cutlery and – gross – an apple core, you finally find your phone and frantically google ‘discount travel sites‘. There are still flights! You quickly scan through the pages of information about hotels and airlines, trying to find something, knowing everyone’s thinking the same thing as you and they maybe got to the web first and maybe paid for their own wi-fi rather than trying to steal it from their neighbors – who are now playing samba music at ear-splitting volumes – like you did.

Desperate, you just bag a flight at random. It’s not till the confirmation email turns up in your inbox while you’re sipping a mojito by a pool with only a few chunks of ice in it, squinting over your sunshades, that you realize you’ve booked yourself in for a weekend of sun, sea and Seattle.

Better luck next year.

Originally posted 2015-04-06 10:42:44.