Tales of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas

“ Hey…I’m going to be in Calgary. Wanna go see the pandas?”

Texting from near Seattle, to my friends on the east coast, I only expected that there was a 30% chance that they would say yes. It was 2018, my partner was going to Lake O’Hara for three days of hiking and he suggested I take the opportunity to go on to Calgary with the car while he was in the mountains, to see the pandas.

I’m pretty sure he just didn’t want to drive all the way to Lake O’Hara by himself. It’s a really long drive.

I had been to China the year before with a slightly larger group of panda fanatics aficionados. We saw more pandas than you can count, ate more strange food than you can imagine and sweated up more humid, hot hills in search of even more pandas.

I even got to tell a joke to a panda.

I’d tell you the joke is I could remember it. Obviously, the panda thought it was really funny. (Photo by Diana Sutton at Gengda panda base)

But back to Calgary. My friends said, sure, why not? We even convinced our friends in Edmonton, part of the entourage that went to China, to come down for the few days we would be there.

The Pandas were a big deal in Calgary. The Calgary Zoo was supposed to have the pandas for 5 years. 6 if they had cubs while they were there, the 2nd part of a 10 year loan from China. They spent their first 6 years in Toronto, where they had twin panda cubs. You may remember seeing a picture of the twins sitting on PM Justin Trudeau’s lap, right around the time that you know who got elected, and like 65 million people thought maybe moving to Canada would be a really good idea.

Because Baby Pandas!!!

So anyway…The hotel had this 6’ tall cardboard cutout of one of the cubs in the lobby near the elevators. Cami and Frances had gotten to the hotel first and when I was checking in, I said to the desk clerk, “OOO, could we have that (pointing to the panda) in our room?’

She laughed politely, thinking “weird Americans” and I went up to the room. 15 minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and a smiling maintenance guy said, “Where do you want this?” as he stood in the doorway with the 6’ panda cutout.

The following September, 2019, we went again, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas rides again. We were joined by several more of the panda diaspora. Another friend from NY just happened to be there at the same time, so she joined us for a day at the zoo. Another friend of the panda diaspora from Switzerland decided to make the trip, as well as two of the people we know from Washington DC, not to mention the Edmonton and Calgary resident contingent.

We cut a rather memorable swath through the Panda Pavilion Gift Shop as we bought out the entire stock of a particularly cute and pandatomically accurate stuffed panda. I’m pretty sure they are still talking about it.

Plans were made for a few more panda fans to converge on an unsuspecting Calgary in June of 2020.

That did not go quite as we had imagined.

It turns out that pandemics have absolutely nothing to do with pandas. At some point, the pandas went back to China early, while the zoo and the border to Canada was still closed. We held out hope for the first couple months that this thing, this virus would all blow over.

Reader, it did not.

Sometimes I think that the only thing that got me through those first weeks after our governor called for a lockdown, after everyone who could work from home did so, after people who couldn’t stay home started getting sick, overrunning hospitals, started dying in incomprehensible numbers, the only thing that got me up after a night of weird sleep insomnia, was our group text chain. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pandas.

“Good morning”
“Good morning”
”You up?”
“coooooooffffffeeeeeeeeee”

There came a time, after the vaccines, after the insurrection,

that we thought we could gather. But flights were being cancelled, hundreds or more each day, new variants popped up, so we stayed home. It took until this October, more than 3 years after we had last met in Calgary, that we met in person once again.

I’ll save that story for another time, but until then, gather those you love, whether in person or in your daily text chain.

“Good morning”