Steve Barkey’s hoping Wednesday’s the day.
If all goes well, his American partner will land at the Vancouver airport, successfully pass through border control and hop onto a connecting flight to Regina where the cross-border couple will finally be reunited.
Then they’ll hunker down in seclusion in their RV at a friend’s farm in Grenfell, Sask. for two weeks where Barkey has been waiting not so patiently for the past two weeks.
That sounds pretty simple, but in a world complicated by a health pandemic, sustaining a cross-border romance can encounter some heavy duty road blocks.
“I just don’t want this to go wrong,” said Barkey, who hails from Barrie.
It’s been an arduous couple of weeks for Barkey, 65, and Cathy Kolsch, 60, of California.
A late-in-life love bloomed for the pair two years ago and for the past year and a half they’ve been travelling the world and living in their RV.
For many years, Barkey lived a regular life in Barrie as a salesman for Purolator. When he retired he decided to see the world, so he sold his home and his cottage and moved into his RV.
Cathy Kolsch joined him and they started a life together on wheels.
Their summers are spent in Barrie, split between their parked RV and his boat, which he docks at the Barrie Marina.
Last October they left Barrie and headed south, parked the RV in California and then flew back to Roatán, in the Honduras, where they met.
They spent much of the winter there and finally caught one of the last flights to California to fetch their RV on April 1.
But their trek across the continent back to Barrie came to an end in North Dakota when border officials told them they didn’t have the documents they needed to prove they are a common-law couple and refused Cathy entry into Canada. Immediate family members are permitted into Canada under pandemic rules.
Steve, in turn, was refused re-entry into the U.S. through the closed border as a Canadian visitor.
She was forced to turn around and go back to California while Barkey continued on to his friend’s farm.
“I’ve got her medication, I’ve got everything,” he said, explaining that all of their belongings are on the RV, which is their home.
Now, Cathy is trying to cross the border again so that they can be together. And Barkey said they’ve been diligently getting all the paperwork together prior to her Wednesday flight.
On Monday, Barkey started worrying that if they were unsuccessful this time, it could be weeks or months before they see each other again.
So, he bit the bullet, dropped $1,500 and hired an immigration lawyer to ensure they’re complying with all the rules and not missing anything. He will also have an agent on hand at the Vancouver airport if Cathy hits a snag.
“We’ve been together for a year-and-a-half and we both realize we were meant to be together,” he said. “We’re both retired and we want to spend our retirement travelling together.”
If all goes following the well-laid plan, the happy couple will point their mobile home east and make the trek back to Barrie in two weeks’ time.
