Kingston, ON 2017 |
Big Apple, 2017 |
From this point forward, the trip took a different turn - our focus now was to spend time with friends and family. The kids spent hours with their friends or cousins on trampolines or in swimming pools. The adults visited and drank wine. We still spent plenty of time on the road as we travelled from Toronto to Erin to Windsor to Sarnia to fit in a visit with as many as we could in five days.
Canada's Wonderland, 2017 |
Five days went by too quickly, and the morning of the 28th it was time for us to pack up and make the power drive home. We crossed into the US from Sarnia and took the route through the upper peninsula of Michigan and Wisconson, stopping in Duluth for the night. It was a long day of driving, but the scenery was beautiful and everyone's spirits were good. The next day we trekked through Minnesota, North Dakota, and into Saskatchewan.
North Dakota, 2017 |
It was an exhausting end to an incredible trip, but I wouldn't have done anything differently given the constraints we had. We saw so much of Canada, had so many amazing experiences. My eyes were opened to the true vastness of this country - in terms of literal distance (we drove over 14,000 km), but also in terms of how much wild, open space there still is. I was saddened to see the wasting away of small towns throughout the country (in the prairies, Northern Ontario, the Maritimes) - even though Jay and I were both part of that migration, and heartened by the growing cosmopolitan nature of our cities.
Most of all, I was struck by the "sameness" of Canada. The landscape was certainly a part of it with the bulk of country sitting on the Canadian shield and housing boreal forest. I didn't appreciate how fortunate we are in Calgary to be surrounded by so many different landscapes and ecosystems, to have so much diversity on our doorstep.
More than that though, no matter where we went, regardless of population or language, there was an indescribable undercurrent of Canadianism; a je ne sais quoi that connects us all together, that makes us more similar than we are different. I noticed this most when it was gone, when we were in the United States. I became fascinated by John A. MacDonald - what could have inspired him to connect this land mass into a country. Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces made sense economically and politically, but why extend the reach across the then Northwest Territories to BC? Why bank on a railroad that wasn't conceptualized, let alone built? There was a huge cost, unfortunately, to the First Nations and Metis, to the Chinese immigrants who came to work on the railroad. Yet, somehow he did it - he and subsequent generations built a nation that spans the second biggest area on the planet, and still holds a singular identity.
My final word - we live in an amazing, beautiful country, go out and explore it.