Most Memorable Holiday

We had never been across Canada, but in 2000 with our daughter living in Calgary, we headed out on quite a road trip. Canada is a vast country; we started around the middle and only went as far as Alberta, leaving out BC. And of course there lay Quebec and the Maritimes on the other side — to be visited in the next summer.

We weren't in a rush and with one extra day for car troubles, it took us 8 days to get to Calgary. (We later got home in 3 days across the northern States, but we were moving pretty constantly.) We camped half of the time, spent two nights in a motel in Winnipeg, one night at a B&B in Saskatchewan, and one in a motel in Medicine Hat waiting for our car to be repaired.

It was great. With our little Corolla packed to the hilt, we felt like adventurers.

Our province, Ontario is the second largest in Canada and stretches a long way from east to west. It took us three days before we hit the Prairies. Travelling north of Lake Superior along the Canadian Shield was quite wonderful.

Then, there was the big sky of the supposedly boring Prairies, which were not boring to me. We detoured down to the Cypress Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan where I took a photo of this Coulee (old stream bed).

Once landed in Calgary, Allyson took us to the badlands. This was one of the hoodoos, left standing tall after surrounding rock had been eroded away.

As nice as the badlands were, the next day we headed to the Rockies. The majesty overwhelmed me.

After that, we headed back to the mountains every chance we got over the next few weeks. Of course, we visited beautiful Lake Louise.

One day we drove the Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefields. What a drive! We stopped for a view of Peyto Lake.

Back and forth we went but eventually ended up in Jasper National Park where I met up with a boyhood chum. We took the trolley to the top and looked down on the world.

I loved the Rockies; they had a tremendous impact on me. Each and every night for a whole month after our return, I dreamt of the mountains. No other place, mountains or otherwise has left me feeling like that.

After that trip, I actually made a web page going into the trip almost day-by-day in detail using the journal that I kept along the way and many many photos; it was still the days of film, and memory informs me that I took 36 rolls. It seemed like a lot at the time but not so very much from the perspective of the digital age.

As I said above, the trip home was a quick 3 days of constant travel and not a memorable part of the trip. In thirty days, we put more than 12000km/7500miles on the car, but then it was time to get back into a normal existence.