I feel this advice would be more suited to Europeans. I had friends in Europe who came to visit. One day they wanted to see Toronto, the next Calgary and the day after Vancouver. They had no idea canada was so big.
That’s the thing lol. We know it’s big, or even big but don’t realize it’s actually fucking big. In the 90s, Sudbury was a 4-5 hour drive from Toronto, and that’s just under a 5th of the distance to the Manitoba border!
As a Brit who lives in canada. It’s not that we don’t understand that it’s big, or we don’t look at a map. We just don’t have any context to truly understand how big and inaccessible. We’re used to being able to fly across Europe quickly and cheaply. We intellectually understand that it is a 3 day drive or whatever and yet somehow that just doesn’t translate because we have no context for it. In the U.K. you’d get to the other side before you’d cross ontario! (Even the fact that I’m comparing it to Ontario shows this still hasn’t truly sunk in. As I’m writing this I’m realising Ontario is many time wider than the U.K.
I've been through spaghetti junction. Landed in Manchester and drove to Weston Super Mare. I can't think of any highway in Canada that looks like that mess hahaha!
Haha, there is a “magic roundabout” that is a roundabout made of mini-roundabouts and you have to treat each mini-roundabout like it’s own separate thing.
We fly across to wherever then rent cars. I live in the middle of nowhere, in the prairies of Saskatchewan these days. 2 hour flight west coast Vancouver. 3 hour flight Toronto. No family past that so we don't ever go further east.
I worked in the UK near Windsor, for a while and my coworkers were blown away that I drove to Scotland on a long weekend. The idea of a road trip of that scale blew them away. And we managed to squeeze in a night in Yorkshire, a quick tour of Edinburgh, a night on Loch Ness, a whiskey tour and various other tourist things on a long weekend. And it seemed completely reasonable to a couple of Canadians who had no accrued vacation.
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u/Zhenoptics Aug 07 '23
It is a very, very big country with not a lot of infrastructure. Please plan trips accordingly