Road Tripping Tipping

Noodling About In Canada

I went on holiday and now I’m back. I had a great time on holiday and am also delighted to be home, in my own bed where I slept for a solid twelve hours last night after a late night return flight in which I achieved two hours of broken sleep, all the while dreaming I was on safari thanks to turbulence. This dream effectively ensured I actually had two, very different holidays. Thanks to my unconscious for that.

In real life we went on a Canadian road trip starting in Vancouver and ending in Toronto. We travelled thousands of miles and packed in many adventures along the way. We were blessed with brilliant weather except for one day where it rained, but that was the big travel day where we drove 450 km. We spent most of that day in a car, which is the best way to experience adverse weather on holiday - with heating and windscreen wipers.

I’ll be unpacking the trip in more detail in the next few posts. Here’s an overview of some of the things we learned en route if you’re thinking about embarking on a road trip, and as a reminder to us for our next one.

Look at this tree root. It looks a bit like a haunted turnip crossed with Gonzo from the Muppets. It was worth flogging around on a forest trail just to see this and I hate exercise.

We did a big American road trip last year from Seattle to San Francisco. Jason hired a huge car, which was suitably American in size and proportions. Forty-seven cup holders, giant grilles to repel oncoming kraken etc. It was very much like taking your living room for a trip out. It was very comfortable, but an absolute nightmare driving narrow, cliffside roads in Oregon. It was also a terror to park because it was tall as well as wide, and most of the parking garages we found in cities were made for road hugging vehicles. This time, knowing that we would be a) traversing the Rockies and b) driving around cities, we hired a smaller, human sized car. It made life about 75% less stressful.

The first leg of our journey took us from Vancouver to Vancouver Island. This means travelling by ferry. We have done this journey many times before. We have never pre-booked ferry tickets and always got on the boat we needed. What we didn’t factor in this time was that we would be travelling over the Easter weekend. The airport in Vancouver was a doddle and we were off the plane and en-route to Tsawwassen ferry terminal within 40 minutes. We arrived in time to get the 6.00 p.m. ferry over to the island, congratulating ourselves entirely prematurely it transpired.

Tsawwassen is just a ferry terminal and a giant spit of land jutting out into the sea. You pay at the booth, drive onto a strip of concrete as instructed and wait for the ferry. That’s it. The six o’clock ferry came. We got ready to board. The six o’clock ferry filled up and sailed away and we were still waiting. Jason went to find a member of staff who told us that not only did we not get on the six o’clock ferry, but that it was very unlikely we would get on the seven or eight o’clock ferry either. We said: ‘But surely you don’t sell tickets unless you have spaces,’ to which he replied: ‘Oh, but we do.’ The last ferry sailing was at ten o’clock. We said: ‘What happens if we don’t get on that?’ He said: ‘We refund you, and you have to come back tomorrow and start again.’ There were no reservations left until the following Tuesday by this point, and they only offer a fraction of their capacity as reservations, so even when you’re trying to pre-book, these fill up quickly.

Eventually, after having sat in an exhausted stupor miserably watching the spectacular sunset over the water, we were one of the last five cars squeezed onto the nine o’clock crossing. I cannot lie. I burst into tears when we rolled onto the boat.

The journey takes one hour forty minutes, with added time for loading and unloading. We finally got to our Airbnb at midnight after about sixteen hours of travel, hallucinating with tiredness. We will never not pre-book a ferry again. Also we will pay considerably more attention than we normally do to any holidays we take where national festivities are happening.

If you’re sensitive to noise, it’s wise to book Airbnbs with separate bedrooms to your living space. Canadian fridges can be very loud and unpredictable. Sometimes Canadian air conditioning is also very loud and unpredictable. Ear plugs are a good investment. Everyone I know swears by Loop earplugs. Treat yourself.

If you’re incorporating air travel into a section of your road trip, you might want to think about luggage allowances. Our trip out and back was Business Class (thanks to Air Miles) and our luggage allowance was generous. We road tripped by car from Vancouver to Calgary and then flew from Calgary to Toronto for our last few days. Our internal flight was Economy and required us to spend a stressful forty minutes footling about with the suitcases prior to boarding, calibrating everything so it came out to 23kg or less.

We learned from our last road trip that doing a day here, two days there etc, for the entirety of a trip doesn’t particularly suit us. After a while we need a bit more unwinding time in the schedule. We spent quite a bit of effort in the planning stages thinking about how to divide up our days most effectively. In the end, we did the most moving about in the first part of our stay when we were still not entirely in relaxed holiday mode and didn’t mind being on the go.

We broke those early days into manageable driving lengths so that we actually had time to stop in places and properly explore when the mood took us, and we weren’t just driving about and arriving when we were too tired to enjoy anything. The only exception was the 450km day, where we drove from Kamloops to Canmore through the Rockies and that would have been more manageable if we hadn’t been lured into a wildlife sanctuary in the morning and spent two hours grinning like fools at bears and arctic foxes. I’d say it was worth it on the whole.

We learned from the US trip to make sure we always had things to eat en-route just in case we had to traverse several hundred miles with no sight of a human being, and end up so desperate for sustenance we ended up eating lunch at 4.00 p.m. in an ant-infested Dennys’ at Fort Bragg because it’s the only thing we could find. It turned out this wasn’t actually necessary, as Canadian roads were not only better kept and easier to travel on, but also better supplied with places to snack/eat en route. Having said that, snacks are always good. I developed an unhealthy obsession with Que Pasa, round, salted nachos and demolished several family sized bags of them on my travels.

We also decided to do all our countryside/wilderness in the first half of the holiday and do the cities in the second half for longer chunks of time. We did four nights in Calgary where we still had the car and then flew to Toronto where we had three nights without the car before we came home. This worked brilliantly for us. Some of it was accidentally brilliant because we didn’t realise that we would cross two time zones on our trip. We started off being eight hours behind the UK and ended up being five hours behind, which has made managing the jet lag much better at this end.

You really do need a car in Calgary to get around. There isn’t much traffic, even in the city centre, except at rush hour and there is affordable parking absolutely everywhere. You absolutely do not need a car in Toronto unless you want to be stuck in traffic, screaming at people, which we could have stayed at home for. Public transport in Toronto is good, efficient and safe to use and we found it very easy to get around.

In fact, both Calgary and Toronto were great in terms of safety. We did a lot of walking and quite a bit of using public transport and unlike last year in Seattle and San Francisco, I felt comfortable everywhere I went. The most homelessness and active drug use we saw on our whole trip was actually in Victoria on Vancouver Island. My view is almost certainly skewed because of the way we travelled through these places, and I am not even pretending to be authoritative because I was just passing through and have no knowledge of the complexity of the situation, but I definitely did feel far more comfortable in Canada.

We only booked three things to do before our holiday, two restaurants and one whale watching excursion. We like to explore fairly intuitively as we go about. We also like to leave time for relaxing in our pants.

We were recommended the Longview Steakhouse in Calgary and I wish we had attempted to book that, because when we tried while we were there, it was fully booked until 2026, but that was the only thing we didn’t manage to do, and I’m not sure it would have been available even if we had tried to book a couple of months ago.

We spent quite a lot of time beforehand thinking about how we like to spend our time and making sure we addressed our non-negotiables. We knew we wanted to go whale watching but we also know we are not very good with tourists that aren’t us, so we splurged on a private boat trip. This meant that we didn’t have to spend six hours on the water with snap happy pensioners in Pacamacs getting over excited about kelp. It also meant that we could stop for lunch when we were hungry and detour if something looked interesting that wasn’t standard. Most importantly it meant that we had the option to turn around and come back if we hated it. We didn’t, but it was nice to know we could.

We thought long and hard about Niagara Falls when we got to Toronto and because we didn’t have a car and by public transport it was about two and a half hours each way, we decided to skip it. It would have been gutting to spend five hours of precious time travelling to see it and then potentially get bored after ten minutes of looking at water hurtling down a rock face. I know it’s a natural wonder etc, but I also know that I’m most often entranced by the things that are accidentally brilliant rather than Trip Advisor highlights.

We always cross-checked whatever Trip Advisor recommended with other sources before we decided on anything to do. Conde Nast Traveller is usually pretty reliable for recommendations. We also like to find blogs/substacks etc as long as they’re not adverts or sponsored content. We always look for things that are a little out of the ordinary and we like to talk to people on the ground and get recommendations that way. We had a brilliant chat with a museum guide at the contemporary art gallery in Calgary who gave us some stellar recommendations for things to do that totally changed our perception of Calgary as a city. We prioritise bookshops, food and art galleries as a matter of course. We hunt out thrift stores too. On this trip we also prioritised animals because you don’t get to see bears at home much.

We were lucky. We had a comfortable budget for this trip, but if you don’t, then plan for the fact that unlike in the UK generally and London in particular, you will have to pay entrance fees for all museums and big galleries. And of course, in North America you never pay the ticket price for anything you buy because they always add taxes at the point of sale, so you will need to factor that into your purchases. We were also lucky because the exchange rate was in our favour on this trip and this effectively halved the price of everything we bought while we were away, which allowed us to be a bit more decadent.

The other, very specific to me thing I learned was that sometimes it’s best to leave the past exactly where it is - behind you. The first part of the trip included some revisits of things we had done with the kids when they were small, and a couple of things I had done that were very meaningful to me from before I met Jason, and which I wanted to do again with him. These turned out to be the most disappointing things we did. Luckily there were only a few of these moments and I am still glad I did them, because now I can truly let go of them, but boy, they made me rather sad. Also by accident rather than design, these were all things that happened at the beginning of the holiday and which we were able to move on from with new and significantly happier things.

On the whole, we had a blast. I got to hang out with my best friend for nearly three weeks of uninterrupted shenanigans and titting about, and that’s pretty special no matter what.