Route

Canada
Québec & New Brunswick
Nova Scotia & Newfoundland
Québec & Ontario
Manitoba to the Pacific

Canada

Route

What a trip this turned out to be! We had no doubts about Canada's enormous distances, but we simply had no concept of what that meant in practice. All of a sudden a 500km drive is only enough to take you "to the next town"! We drove about 40,000km, not including the various ferry routes.

Here's an attempt at a map showing our detailed route, but it's only a very rough approximation. Broadly speaking we followed this route: started Montréal, arriving by flight from Quito, changing at Miami. While waiting for the purchase of "Mortimer", our RV (motorhome), in Montréal to be completed we hired a car and did a circuit of the Cantons de l'Est in Québec and then returned to Montréal. From here we travelled east along the southern shore of the St. Laurent, through Gaspésie and into New Brunswick. From here we meandered into and through Nova Scotia, visiting Prince Edward Island en route, and then made our way across the Cape Breton towards Sydney, at the north-east end of Nova Scotia. We took a ferry across to Newfoundland and headed all the way to St. John's before finally making our "turn" and starting the long route to the west coast. We completed a circuit of the St. Laurent by crossing over into Labrador, and then took a freighter ferry along the north shore of the St. Laurent as far as Havre St. Pierre, from where we drove on, through Tadoussac and Québec (the city), and into Ontario, to Ottawa. Next stop was Toronto, and we carried on round the lake to Niagara. We returned to Toronto and made a "side trip" to visit Caz, Andy, Joe and Ben who had just arrived in Florida (coinciding with the mighty Hurricane Wilma).

Next we headed across enormous Ontario, passing along the northern shores of several of the Big Lakes - these seemed more like seas if not oceans to us! After reaching remote Thunder Bay we continued on into Manitoba. By now the Canadian winter had started to make it's arrival felt and after a last few cold nights in "Morty" we had to switch to hotels/motels for a little while as we made our way across the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and finally Alberta. The huge flat expanses of these provinces, with never-ending straight roads are something to experience. Culturally we were now among descendants of Ukrainians, Finns, Hungarians, Dutch, instead of the French/Irish/Scottish heritage of the Maritimes. We reached the Rockies just as the snow had started to accumulate seriously. We made a detour to visit Drumheller, in the Alberta "Badlands", dinosaur country, and then made our way across the Rockies via Banff. Into British Columbia, and on to temperate cosmopolitan Vancouver. This gave us a little taster of Asia which lay ahead, with a large Chinese and Korean population. We considered our "trek" across Canada complete when we reached the Pacific at Tofino, on Vancouver Island. At Victoria we said goodbye to Morty, spent a last day there and then headed back across the water to catch our long-haul flight to Hong Kong.

(Overland, Flight, Boat)

Detailed route map, Canada

Prev | Up

Top

Visitors:
Home \| Info \| Blog \| Travel \| Pictures \| Site map \| Search \| Guestbook	Copyright © 2001-2007 Stefan and Vanessa Aalten-Voogd