Do you want to know how far it is to...

Our family is just ending a week-long vacation.  All parties were a little sad to see it end, which I think is an indication of a successful time.  As I mentioned in my last post, part of our vacation was spent in Canada.  This gave our trip the added exotic flair of being "international" although going from Minnesota to Canada is probably about the tamest international trip one could imagine.  Still, we felt like real jet-setters as we handed our passports to the border patrol.

The boys were expecting that things would be different in Canada, foreign.  They were not disappointed.  Things were just different enough to be exciting without being utterly confusing.  They delighted in the little things: "Look! The McDonald's arches have a little maple leaf on them!"  The pool at our motel used saline solution instead of chlorine.  The boys assumed this was a Canadian thing and reveled in the brilliance of it.  If it was different, it was Canadian.  And if it was Canadian it was cool.

I think one of my favorite Canadian differences is their use of kilometers over miles.  I liked that I was able to finally use the numbers on the inner part of my speedometer.  They seemed to work just fine.  I also liked how my brain kept flipping back to miles whenever I saw a road sign.  The conversation would be something like: "Oh man, it's still 11 miles to Ouimet Canyon.  Oh, wait a minute, it's not 11 miles, it's 11 kilometers!" We never bothered to try to convert what the distance was in miles.  We just knew that kilometers were shorter than miles.  It was like we'd been instantly transported closer.  I wonder if the opposite sort of thing ever happens to Canadians when they travel in the U.S..  Perhaps they are constantly depressed to find that things are farther away than they initially thought.

By far, my favorite reason for using kilometers was that it allowed me to refer to distances in "klicks".  I used the term as often as I could, even for relaying inconsequential and unwanted information (e.g. "I think there's a Sears about 2 klicks up the road.").  I never aspired to be a soldier but I always liked it in war movies when they talked in klicks.  It was nice to have a chance to try it out.  So I klicked about this and I klicked about that and eventually I irritated the others to the point where I was asked to stop.  And so I stopped.  Or at least I tried to.  I think a couple more klicks probably slipped out, purely by accident.

But now we're home and the klicks are stowed away with the passports until our next international trip.