Monday 30 October 2017

Summary for our Canada Adventure 2017


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.

 


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.






Away from the major townships mail boxes like this were common sight