This was our second Labor Day weekend in Charlevoix and the weather gave us the exact same moody, rainy Saturday as the year before. At this point I think it is just part of the tradition.

I have wanted to go to Europe my entire life. Not a specific country at first, just Europe, the idea of it. And then Norway became the answer and suddenly the trip that had lived in my imagination for so long had a shape.

I did not technically land in Europe for the first time in Oslo. I landed in Copenhagen. A passport stamp and a kind customs agent later, Norway had already started doing something to me.

If you spend enough time in New England you start to feel personally owed a moose sighting. And then one day you are driving a road you have traveled hundreds of times and something moves at the tree line.

There is a particular feeling that comes with driving back into a city you used to live in. Not quite nostalgia, not quite homecoming. Something in between that does not have a clean word for it.

We drove to the Canadian border to watch the sky go dark in the middle of the afternoon and I would do it again immediately, even knowing what the drive home was going to look like.