Right. So I mentioned in the last post that something specific was coming, and that it explained the thermal underwear, and that I’d tell you about it properly another time.
This is another time.
We’re going to Canada.
We leave on the 30th of November. And before anyone gets excited on my behalf, I want to be very clear about the nature of this undertaking: it is a research trip. Wholly and entirely undertaken in support of my writing. There is no other reason. I have thought about it from several angles and I am confident this framing holds.
Here is the itinerary. You may draw your own conclusions and I would ask that you keep them to yourself.
November 30. We leave. Out of home and up to Sydney first, because you cannot simply leave from here. Nothing simply leaves from here. Getting off this island is a process with stages.
Then Auckland, and from Auckland to Vancouver, across an ocean that I have looked at on a map several times now and which does not get smaller no matter how long I stare.
And we arrive on November 30. The same November 30. We cross the international date line and it hands the day back to us like we’d left it on the counter. I have had this explained to me. I have nodded along. I have subsequently tried to explain it to someone else and heard my own voice tail off halfway through. I am simply going to get on the plane and let it happen to me.
Eight days on the ground. Which sounds generous until you see what we’ve done with them.
Because here is the actual shape of it.
We land in Vancouver. Then we get in a car and drive to Edmonton — which, for the locals playing along, is not a little jaunt. It is a proper day of driving. In December. In Canada.
We’re driving to Edmonton to watch the Washington Capitals play the Oilers on the 3rd.
Now, I want to be clear that I have credentials here. I have done Brisbane to Geelong to catch the Spirit — nineteen hours, one stage, no sensible stopping — and I have done it twelve times, which I think we can all agree is eleven times more than any reasonable person would. So I’m not frightened of a long drive. Long drives and I have an understanding.
But every single one of those nineteen-hour runs, the only chill involved was the air conditioning set to nipsicle. That’s my entire experience of being cold in a car: self-inflicted, reversible, and available at the touch of a dial. I have never once driven through weather that was trying to kill me. I suspect there is a meaningful difference between “big” and “big and also frozen“, and I am about to learn it personally, in the dark, somewhere in Alberta.
The next morning we get back in the car and go four hours to Calgary, where on the 5th we watch the Capitals play the Flames — in the Saddledome, in its final year. That one matters to me more than I expected it to. Buildings like that don’t get replaced, they get succeeded, and there’s a particular ache in walking into a place while you still can. I fully intend to be embarrassing about it.
And then another full day’s drive back to Vancouver, where on the 7th — and you will never guess this — we watch the Capitals play the Canucks.
The day after that, we fly home.
So to summarise: I am flying roughly as far as it is possible to fly, in order to sit in three different buildings in three different cities across five days and watch the same team play hockey, with two enormous drives wedged in between, and then I am immediately coming home again.
Research.
I write hockey romance. I have written a great deal of hockey romance. And I want to put something on the record here, plainly, because it is the single most damning sentence in this entire post:
I have never once set foot inside a hockey arena.
Not once. Never. I have written arenas I have never stood in. Road trips I have never taken. Rooms I have never smelled. The specific quality of cold that comes off the ice and settles on your forearms — I have described that with enormous confidence on the basis of absolutely nothing but video footage and the reports of kinder, better-travelled people.
At some point a person has to go and check.
That’s my story. I’m sticking to it. My accountant may have questions and I am prepared for them.
The other thing — the real thing, if I’m honest — is who I’m doing it with.
Karen is American, and she and I have been at this together since somewhere around 1998. That’s not a typo. That is longer than some of you have been alive, and it is certainly longer than any sensible person maintains a correspondence about imaginary people.
She has been through forty-eight of my novels. Forty-eight. Forty-five of which have never seen daylight outside my own very small circle — which is to say, outside Karen and Jo. There are manuscripts on my hard drive that only two other human beings on this planet have ever read, and both of those human beings will be in the car with me in December.
There are days I’m not entirely convinced Karen and I aren’t operating on the same brain with a very bad connection between the halves.
And in all those years we have conducted the entire relationship across a time difference that has never once been convenient for either of us. In December we will be in the same country. The same car. The same building. At the same time.
The plan — and I use that word loosely — is that in the down times we’ll get some words down. Between drives. In the evenings. In airports.
I want to be honest with you about how likely that is.
We will write. We will absolutely write. What we will not do is make words. There’s a difference, and if you’re one of us you already know it: making words is the part where you sit down and put sentences in a document and it is work. Making stories is the other thing. It’s two people in a car for eleven hours going but what if he doesn’t tell her and no, wait, go back, what if it’s the brother and building an entire cathedral of plot out loud that neither of you writes down, and both of you remember perfectly two years later.
We’re going to come home with a folder containing one paragraph and a list of things we’re definitely going to write about later. And it will have been the most productive trip of my life.
And Jo is coming with us — I’ve just realised I hadn’t mentioned that — which means there will be a third person in that car, listening to two grown women argue passionately about the motivations of people who do not exist. She’ll smile in that way she does. The perplexed one. The one that says I love you both and I have no idea what is happening here. Jo has read the forty-five too, mind you. She knows exactly who we’re arguing about. She simply retains the ability to be normal about it, which is a gift neither Karen nor I have ever possessed.
We’re bringing the laptops. On principle.
The cats, meanwhile, will be furious. Fifteen of them, abandoned in the run-up to Christmas, with no regard for their feelings. In my defence there is a shed out the back containing over a thousand cans of cat food, which in hindsight makes the August boat trip look less like an unhinged errand and more like strategic forward planning.
I’d like that noted too.
thestationhousenotebook 