Canada Summary
We
thoroughly enjoyed our Canada experience. If the opportunity arose for us to
return to Canada we would jump at it. Ideally, we would love the opportunity to
travel at our preferred pace, allowing for about a 3-year period enabling us to
soak in what Canada has to offer.
We truly
missed the comforts of our Australian travelling rig, finding the Canadian rig
set ups quite different, with reliance on noisy generators as the primary off
grid source of power and very little off grid or free camping permissible.
Unfortunately,
during our period in Canada Mary’s broken wrist was more of a hindrance than we
envisaged due to difficulties participating in our normal daily activities
without a continual risk assessment / anxiety / concerns she could easily slip
and hurt it again. However, despite Mary’s restrictions we still managed to
partake in the majority of our wish list activities whilst in Canada. Steve had
to do the bulk of the work and all the driving, where we would normally share
the load. In hind sight if we had put this trip off for another year, we both
would have obtained even more pleasure from what Canada could provide for us.
Look at the size of Marys left hand to her right.
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Our
preference for flexible travel options did come at a cost - not being able to
do everything when we wanted. The flip side of being unable to book a motor
home when we hoped, provided the option to fill in some spare time with a last-minute
booking, a cruise ship experience, travelling the Alaskan Inside Passage with a
bonus of a discounted price before commencing our motorhome experience. Our
choice to explore provincial parks (Australian equivalent – national parks) in
preference to commercial tourist publicized locations was most enlightening for
us providing pure pleasure.
It was a bit
difficult keeping track of our expenditure due to incurring some expenses in
Australian dollars, some in Canadian and some in American dollars with the
unknown real conversion costs and fees affiliated with that at the time.
We estimate
our 3-month Canada holiday cost in the vicinity of about $30,000, with the
probability of a couple of thousand dollars of hidden expenses? These costs are
all inclusive.
Some of
those all-inclusive costs incurred for our Canada experience include the
purchase of a laptop computer for recording this journal & internet research activities, a small pocket size camera, many other items
in preparation for our trip at around $3500, air fares at about $4,000, hire
vehicles at about $10,000, accommodation at about $4,000, cruise ship at about
$3,300, fuel $1,200, food $2,000 with other sundry expenses.
We loved our
Canada experience with a very different green landscape to our dry Australian
landscape. Canadian people were generally very polite. A special bonus was spending
time with the most like-minded awesome people we have ever met, Taylor and
Ernie.
Just a few
more pictures showing a different type of scenery from what we see in
Australia.
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| Away from the major townships mail boxes like this were common sight |
