In the summer of 2018, Kimberley was coming to terms with the end of a relationship. To cheer herself up, she went on holiday to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. “I’d never taken a trip by myself before but it seemed like a good time,” she says. When she boarded her return flight to Vancouver, an attendant asked if any adults were flying solo. “There were children sitting in the emergency exit aisle who wouldn’t be able to operate the doors in an emergency, so they wanted people to swap seats. I sheepishly raised my hand.” She soon noticed that another passenger had done the same. “He was so tall and handsome,” she remembers.
They sat down together and started chatting. “I was heading to Iceland on holiday, passing through Vancouver,” says Manuel, who is Mexican and worked as a hotel architect. “We started talking about Vancouver because it’s where Kim is from, then she told me her family is actually Icelandic.” As the trip progressed they discussed “a million different things” and discovered common ground. “We’d even studied at the same university,” says Kimberley. “The five-hour flight went by more quickly than I’d have liked.”
