Christie Mitchell has made countless trips to the US in her lifetime. She has hiked national parks, attended American football games and drove an RV through several states down to Florida.
The 50-year-old mother of two from the town of Powell River, British Columbia, even remembers a time when you didn’t need a passport to cross the border.
“I’m of that generation where I thought [Canada and the US] were just one big country,” she said. “I just always felt welcome.”
But that feeling has faded under the current administration, she said, which she does not want to support with her purchasing power.
“It breaks my heart, because I love Americans and I love America.”
Boycotting travel to the US pushed Mitchell towards accomplishing a goal she has always had: hiking the 490-mile (790km) Camino Francés route through Spain.
She did the popular hike earlier this year to celebrate her 50th birthday in lieu of taking a quick, and cheaper, trip to Las Vegas – which is where she was thinking of celebrating, prior to the boycott.
Her favourite thing about the route in Spain, Mitchell added, is all the people she met along the way.
“Some people do the hike for personal reasons, and many of the people I talked to were in a transition,” she said, adding that the hike had given her the chance to have “very lovely conversations with complete strangers”.
Mitchell said she would be open to visiting the US again if a different president was in the White House, and if relations with Canada were restored.
