Do you remember your first trip? As I shuffled through my mum’s mess room recently, I came across the artifacts from mine. As I opened the gummed-up pages of a coveted album, I found pictures of my Australian nana’s first trip with me in Canada, documenting her visit to the mighty Rockies, with a much less mighty four-year-old me. Research suggests we only start to form our memories at the age of three or four.
As much as I wanted to recall this trip in vivid detail, the only images I could muster were the ones enclosed in those pages. A friend recently told me that post-pandemic, she would latch onto any reason not to travel with her kids. And since COVID emerged, I have also felt far less inclined to travel.
But after going through a uterine cancer diagnosis at age 32, followed by multiple rounds of IVF, I discovered that life is not measured by time, but by the memories we fashion. So this summer, 30 years after that trip with my nana, I took my son on his first ever trip, a vacation to Prince Edward Island. As soon as we landed on the misty tarmac in the night, I smelled the ocean and held back tears.
Even though our memory may be imperfect, our senses have a way of rewinding time. The scent of the ocean took me back to trying Jaffas candy along a pastel bayside strip in Australia, close to my nana’s house, where she’d cut my vegemite-smudged toast into quarters. That place smelled like my home away from home.
Remembering is flawed, but reminiscing is as real as you conjure it. On P.E.
I., I thought about how my partner and I were now the orchestrators of our son’s earliest memories. Even if he was still too young to collect these moments in his mind, they would be sealed into mine: the feeling of being 35,000 feet up in the air, the first whiff of the ocean’s salty brine, the first sight of rust-coloured sand covering the entire island.
In turn, travelling with my son also taught me a different way of seeing the world, which in my younger years used to mean jet-setting as often (and as fast) as I could. Travelling with a baby means you are forced to slow down. You can’t hold onto an outcome.
You can’t always have your phone out. You can’t stay out late. You might have to feed them in the back seat after getting caught in a downpour.
You may have to change them on the grass outside a restaurant. You may have to pull them into bed with you in their unfamiliar environment. But all of these minor inconveniences build grit and, more importantly, build memories.
As my friend said when I was stressing about this trip, you will learn something every time you travel with a baby. We learned to never trust the weather report in P.E.
I. (the rain will pass), to call ahead (they’re on island time, after all), and to just rent the travel crib (Ollie Roo even threw in a free beach kit). As Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in “Anne of Avonlea”: “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.
” P.E.I.
is full of such simple pleasures. Where we stayed in the town of North Rustico was equipped with its own boardwalk system, playground and some of the best restaurants on the island, including Blue Mussel Café, where they told us, “If we don’t catch the halibut this morning, it’s not on the menu.” Many of the best hikes we took were accessible for both strollers and wheelchairs, including the Greenwich Dunes Trail, which carries you over a gaping pond towards a sand-duned beach, and the Cavendish Dunelands Trail, which is popular among the “Anne-heads.
” And the islanders love babies. If you hit up the Summerside Farmers’ Market on a Saturday, you might get a free pound of sausages for having a baby under one. As they packed up the hot dogs, they thanked us for bringing the average age of the island down from 100 years old.
My nana was 96 when she passed, and I hadn’t been back to Australia for more than a decade. But standing on P.E.
I. with my toes sinking in the sand, holding her great-grandson and smelling the ocean air, I was straddling time: back with her and still in the present with my own baby. As Montgomery also wrote, “Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.
” The photos will take you back, but your senses will take you there..
