COVID-19 prompted my husband Will and me to buy e-bikes. Our thinking was that with most of our usual activities likely to be gone or restricted this summer, it would be good to expand the ones we’d be able to do. This included cycling. We’d always enjoyed getting out on our twenty-five-year-old bikes and hoped electric bicycles would let us ride longer and farther and handle steeper hills.

I didn’t quite know what an e-bike was before I bought one. Since then, I’ve learned they have motors that provide pedal-assist. You still pedal the same as with a regular bike, but get more for your effort. E-bikes can go up to 32 kilometres per hour (20 mph) to be classified as bicycles, not mopeds. After each use, you plug them in to recharge the battery.

The motor makes e-bikes heavier than regular bicycles. Usually the battery is attached to the frame. We chose models with built-in batteries and aren’t much heavier than our old regular bikes. This will make them easier to load in our car for outings and easier to ride if the battery ever runs out. I’m especially glad we got the lighter bikes after hearing about a friend’s holiday in Paris. During her first day of renting a heavy e-bike, it toppled onto her and broke her leg.

I chose an upright cruiser style, with a comfortable seat and handy front basket.

Will and I bought our bikes at a local bicycle store, which has been doing a steady business this spring. Some companies are thriving during the pandemic and I see lineups outside of every bike shop in Calgary, where I live. We walked to the store to pick up our e-bikes, rode them home, and tried them out on our quiet, flat neighbourhood streets. The next day, we went for a longer ride on a city bike path, with a hill I previously couldn’t ride all the way up. Half way, I’d have to get off and walk my old bike. On the e-bike, I cruised to the top, passing a group of fit-looking riders in their twenties. What a thrill for a senior citizen!

Will chose a racier model. We’ll enjoy the lunch box on the back for picnics. On a ride to downtown, we had our first look at Calgary’s kayak course on the Bow River.

Calgary enjoyed a couple of weeks of fine weather after we bought our bikes. Will and I took them out every day or two. We conquered numerous hills we’d have struggled with or walked up before. I could still feel the cardio exercise as I pedalled to the crest. We could also do longer rides, to parts of the city we hadn’t previously biked to from our home. I returned feeling less tired than I used to from my regular bike rides, although my sore muscles suggested I’d had a workout.

I’m still cautious about riding a more powerful bike. Wind from the higher speed makes me cooler when I ride. I’ve had to wear more layers of clothing this spring, but this might make biking on hot summer days more comfortable. My e-bike has nine gears, which are easy to change with the paddles on the handle. The power level button on the frame is trickier to use. I still haven’t got the knack of pressing the button 1,2 or 3 times to shift the power up or down while riding.

Colourful, layered clothing in the cool wind.

E-bikes aren’t cheap. Ours were in the lower price range and each one cost more than Will’s first car. But with this spring, summer and probably fall of non travel, e-bikes turn staying at home into a vacation. When Calgary’s weather warms up again, we plan to load our e-bikes into the van and ride in the rolling countryside, tackling hills with ease. Not much beats coasting to the top, leaving those twenty-somethings in our dust.

Our next highlight was a scavenger hunt through Medicine Hat, Alberta, to find a Subway restaurant for our takeout lunch. We plugged the first one into our GPS, which directed us to a suburban shopping mall.  The restaurant was closed. The next closest one was across the highway. It was open, but the clerk said the restrooms weren’t working.

We continued our quest to Subway # 3, downtown. The GPS announced that we’d arrived, but we couldn’t see a Subway sign. We followed the riverside, past a splendid train station in the historic downtown, and crossed the bridge to the next Subway. Closed. We plugged in Subway #5.

Its neon ‘open’ sign glowed. We pushed restaurant door open. Eureka!

“Can we use your washroom before ordering?” we asked.

“Go ahead.”

Armed with our foot-long tuna sandwich, we left the town and decided our best bet for a scenic car picnic lunch was a range road. We turned off at the first reasonable one and parked at a wide point in the road with a distant view of Medicine Hat. As we took out our sandwiches, a pickup truck rumbled behind us and stopped.

“Do you need help?” the driver asked.

“We’re just here eating lunch.”

“Okay.” He smiled and drove onto the highway.

After lunch, we were into the homestretch of our five-day journey across Canada. One more stop in Bassano for gas, restrooms and a non-memorable snack from the convenience store. Approaching Calgary, we saw the  skyline. Soon we were cruising the Deerfoot Trail, in no-longer-rush hour traffic. Minutes later, we turned into our neighbourhood and drove by our fitness centre, its parking lot empty. To our right was our library., closed; our mall, closed except for Shoppers Drug Mart; our Safeway grocery store, thriving, but changed inside by the new social distancing protocols.

Now I’ve been home for five days and find the restrictions easier to handle in my own place. Will and I feel less isolated here in our familiar surroundings and with opportunities to meet neighbours on the street, from a safe distance. We can each do a variety of activities around the house and yard, as well as clean up the crumbs in our car from the picnic lunches. In Ottawa, we didn’t have our bicycles. Yesterday, in beautiful spring weather, we rode around Calgary’s Glenmore trail and I’ve rarely seen it as crowded. All of sudden, everyone has discovered walking. Who knew it existed and could be fun?

This winter, a friend coaxed me to join her choir. This wasn’t something I’d thought of doing since high school. During my childhood and teens, I belonged to choirs at school and church. I enjoyed them and continued to like singing alone or at occasional public events, despite my diminishing vocal quality. No longer able to hit the high notes, my range became limited to about five notes. My voice cracked and stained by end of each song. The tones fell flat, to my own ears.

“I’ve arranged for you to try out the choir this week,” my friend said. She’d also convinced the  administrator to give me a special rate if I decided to stay, since I’d only be there for part of the year.

“Okay,” I said, because she’d gone to all this trouble.

Wednesday afternoon, we drove to her choir practice at a local church. About seventy women, mostly seniors like us, stood in a horseshoe shape facing the choir leader. No sheet music. The notes  rose and fell with the leader’s hand, a method of music reading I found easy to follow.

The meeting brought back memories of my youthful choirs. “Don’t interrupt the line of music by taking a breath.” The director echoed my earlier choir leaders. “Sustain the last note.” The large group sang harmonies that sounded lovely to me. I found myself able to sing all the notes. Either the organizer selected songs suited to amateurs or she arranged them for unpracticed female voices.

Best of all, for those two hours of song I forgot my worries about my family member’s health challenges. The choir had me hooked.

I looked forward to the weekly sessions. After two months, a woman I talked to during the break  convinced me to participate in the next week’s concert at a retirement home. Performing with the group was fun and gave a new dimension to choir practice. Our concert ended with the 1970s O’Jay’s anthem, Love Train, which urges people around the world to join hands and form a train of love. At the rousing finish, we were supposed to join hands with the person beside us. Some of us did; others refrained.

The following week our choir session was cancelled due to COVID-19. It soon became clear we wouldn’t be singing for weeks and months. Then the organizers set up practices on Zoom, a virtual meeting site that has taken off in this time of home isolation.

I’m not swift with technology and worried I wouldn’t figure out Zoom, but with a little advice, Zoom worked easily and well. Now, I follow the leader on my computer screen, while thumbnail pictures of choir members appear along the top or side. During breaks, I switch to gallery view, with thumbnails filling the screen. The first two weeks, over fifty members signed in each time. I’ll miss week three since I’ll be driving from Ottawa, west across Canada to my home in Calgary .

At the virtual Zoom session, the director puts us all on mute, since the system can’t co-ordinate our voices. I discovered my voice doesn’t sound as good alone as I sounded to myself with the group. It still cracks and strains for those high notes.

I wouldn’t want to start with choir online, but virtually continuing with familiar faces and songs was more satisfying than I’d expected. Again, for those two hours, choir brought me out my despondent mood. For the first time since this mass isolation began, I felt that most of us won’t be permanently damaged and we’ll return to our humankind.

Shout Sister operates in numerous Ontario locations. Ottawa has three branches, with our afternoon group the most recent sister. Here’s a YouTube video of one of our older sister groups performing Ben E. King’s Stand By Me, a song our newer group learned this year.

Shout Sister Ottawa \’Stand By Me\’

I have several friends in Calgary who belong to choirs. A year ago, I asked one of them what he gained from being in a choir. He said, “When you sing together, you make each other so much more.” I agree.

On day # 4 of our drive from Ottawa to Calgary, we set out from Winnipeg in sunshine. By now we had our routine down pat. Stop at Tim Hortons mid-morning and/or mid-afternoon for a coffee/tea/hot chocolate/donut and restroom break. Stop at some point for gas and restrooms. The plan never worked exactly right. Some of the gas stations closed their restrooms to customers and we had to find an alternate place. In the outskirts of Regina, usually reliable Tim Hortons was only open for drive-through customers. We went next door to the Esso convenience store, where Will bought a litre of chocolate milk as compensation.

Our lunch routine involved buying a sandwich at Subway, after using their restroom. We usually ordered the 12 ‘ daily special to share, topped with veggies, with pickles on my half, and then looked for a scenic place for our picnic in the car. Today, we drove into Wapella and parked facing the small town’s Centennial Park, which was open to wander through. While it was still too cold to eat at the picnic table, the temperature rose on our way to our 4th night’s destination, Moose Jaw. For the first time on this trip, it was warm enough for a comfortable walk outside. Our Moose Jaw hotel backed onto an unfenced golf course. Will asked the reception desk clerk if we were allowed to walk on it.

“I guess so,” she said. “Why not?”

“Sometimes there are rules about being in public parks.”

“Hmprh,” she said. “I hope all this ends in a few weeks.”

Don’t count on it, we thought.

The next morning, a different reception desk clerk told us she was really glad to see some travellers.

“It’s essential travel,” I said, not wanting her to think I was doing this for fun.

From my limited experience of small town Manitoba and Saskatchewan, provinces with relatively low COVID rates, I think they’re generally following the protocols, but the peoples’ hearts aren’t in it, since they don’t feel personally threatened yet. Will thought the hotel and restaurant clerks in suburban Winnipeg were more relaxed about the rules than their counterparts in Ontario. Our Winnipeg hotel clerk grazed his hand as she passed him our room keys.

After our pleasant walk on the Moose Jaw golf course, it was time to order dinner. Once again, our first choices of restaurant either didn’t answer the phone or their websites said they were temporarily closed due to COVID.  Then, I remembered seeing a Humpty’s restaurant across the main street into town.  It turned out to be open for takeout. Will and I easily jay-walked across the street, which would normally be busy at the end of a work day. To honour the rule of minimizing people in restaurants, Will went inside to get our order while I waited in the sunny, empty parking lot.

This was one of many moments, since #stayhome began, that I’ve felt like a nuclear holocaust survivor, who emerges from her underground shelter to find her city’s buildings, streets and playgrounds largely intact, but its people and activity strangely absent.

On day # 3 of our drive from Ottawa to Calgary, Will and I left Thunder Bay in snowfall.  Traffic was light this Easter Monday morning, but we drove slowly on the slush-covered highway.  The Great Lakes behind us, we were into what I’d call the least scenic section of our trip. Stunted trees interspersed with occasional railway towns. We wondered what we’d encounter at the Manitoba border, having read that the province had set up border patrols on the incoming highways as part of their effort to combat COVID-19. Manitoba has the lowest number of coronavirus cases of any province west of New Brunswick and wants to keep it that way.

The snow stopped by lunch time and rays of sunshine emerged. We bought Subway sandwiches in the town of Dryden and parked beside the Moose statue for our car picnic lunch. Today’s drop in temperature to below freezing, with brisk wind, made the picnic table by the moose not the least bit tempting.

The scenery perked up around Lake of the Woods. We stopped in Kenora for gas and restrooms in the station’s convenience store. When we found the restrooms closed, the store clerk directed us to a local Tim Hortons restaurant. Somehow we missed it and found ourselves on the highway out of town. Fortunately, Will remembered a Tourism Ontario restroom a short distance ahead. It was open, with signs above the sinks telling us not to drink the rust-coloured water.

Refreshed, we approached the Manitoba border with our story prepared.

‘Yes, we know the government told everyone to go home weeks ago, but we had to stay in Ottawa to help our son through his medical treatment. We aren’t travelling for fun, we’re going home; look at our Alberta license plate.’

Entering border control was similar to entering a construction zone. Neon signs, pilons narrowing the road and a woman holding a sign instructed us to slow down. We stopped by a man, who held a long pole out to our car window with a sheet of paper attached to the end.

“This might contain information that applies to you,” he said.

Will grabbed the paper. “No questions?”

“Nope.” The man smiled and waved us on.

I liked the friendly way they handled this. The paper’s one page message advised international and domestic travellers to Manitoba to self-isolate for 14 days, along with the usual COVID-19 instructions for social distancing and handwashing.

Soon we were in flat prairie, and two lane divided highway that would continue all the way to Calgary. Now in the middle of our trip, we passed Lorette, Manitoba, the longitudinal centre of Canada, as determined by a measurement of the distance from Canada’s farthest outlying islands on the east and west coasts.

The rivers in Winnipeg looked high to us, judging by the trees standing in the water rising up the banks. When we checked into our hotel, the reception clerk said that most hotels in the city were closed and we wouldn’t be bothered by people in our hotel because no one was here. An exaggeration, since a half dozen cars were parked in our courtyard that night. But with all of our hotels about 1/4 occupied and no one in the common areas, we were barely aware of others staying in our accommodations.

No answers from the first two restaurants we called to order our takeout dinner. With lucky call # 3 we chose a large grilled salmon meal to share.

Over dinner, Will said that his biggest memory of this trip so far was seeing almost everything closed. But there’s always an upside. Low traffic made the driving comfortable and easy. The empty restaurants and near-empty hotels were grateful for our business. Our hotel rooms were quiet, with no noise from neighbours and the street. It felt like whatever services were open and the whole infrastructure were there just for us and the other isolated travellers unable to #stayhome.