Our Canadian Travel Trips

When we decided that Canada would be our destination for Summer 2019, we talked to several of the Canadian friends that winter in South Texas with us. We love the way they talk, and how most of their sentences end with "eh." That's pronounced like "ay," and the closest we can determine it's like adding a question mark to a statement. From their advice, we only knew that we wanted to visit Canada's most famous national parks. That would be Banff and Jasper, eh? Now that we are at the end of our Canadian adventure, we thought we would summarize some of the things we have learned as we have wandered some of God's international wonders.

From doing preliminary research, we soon found that visiting those very popular parks at peak season would mean that we would have to make reservations months in advance. We found out too late that national park reservations open up on January 1. When we first looked in February, every camp site in Jasper National Park was already reserved for the entire summer! That's largely because the largest campground there--Whistler's--was closed for renovation in 2019! That's terrible timing for us, eh? That took out close to 1,000 possible camping sites, and we almost changed our plan to go to Canada. But a day later Mark saw a cancellation on the reservation web site, and we snapped up those five days at Wabasso Campground (just down the road from Jasper). Suddenly our trip was a possibility again, and we scheduled everything else around that one camp site. Hopefully any other year wouldn't have been that tricky, eh?

Even months in advance, we couldn't find a campground during the last weekend in July. Later we found that was a civil 3-day holiday, and that was why everything was booked up. That would have been a good thing to know in advance. But that gave us a great excuse for a three night stay at the Icefield Discovery Centre. We found several first-come-first-served campgrounds that would be great for people attempting to travel through the area without reservations. One option is a walk-in camp site at Wapiti Campground in Jasper National Park. RVs line up before the campground office opens each morning, in hopes that some of those will open up. Other examples include the overflow parking lot several kilometers outside of Lake Louise Village, and the parking lot at the Icefield Discovery Centre in the middle of the Icefield Parkway. No hook-ups and it is camping in a parking lot, but both are great locations, eh?

We got good advice for foods that we must try in Canada from our neighbors in our very first campground across the border. Their list included things like poutine (french fries and cheese curds with brown gravy over all), and nanaimo bars. No pictures of poutine because it really isn't very picturesque, but we tried it twice. Nanaimo bars are picturesque, and we found them in bakeries three different times. As far as we know, nanaimo is unique to Canada and is a "delicious, creamy pastry filling generously layered on top of a traditional chocolate and coconut base and covered with velvety smooth chocolaty topping."

After paying around $2.50 per small bar, we really hit the jackpot when we found a whole pan of nanaimo for sale for $10.00 at the Canadian Super Store. That would sell for more than $50 if individually cut at a bakery, eh?

We found the Real Canadian Superstore too late in our travels. It is Canada's answer to Walmart.

They stock some things that are only found in Canada--like Old Dutch Ketchup flavored potato chips. That sounds delicious, eh?

Our favorite Canadian candy bar is "Eat-More." The English description of "dark toffee peanut chew" sounds much more appetizing than "tire foncee aux arachides." As you can see, most packaging in Canada comes in both English and French. We did eat more "eat-more" bars, as you can see this is a four pack.

We had to get used to the Canadian currency, where the smallest bill is a five. So we carried around a lot more change than usual. The largest two-colored coin is worth $2 and is called a toonie. The gold coin is worth $1 and is a loonie (because of the picture of a loon on it). It's handy that their quarter, dime, and nickel are the same size as ours. But you won't find any Canadian pennies, because they don't make them. So totals at the grocery store or restaurant, etc. are rounded to the nearest nickel.

This is a great time to visit the Canadian Provinces, because the exchange rate is definitely in our favor. It's like everything is 25% off. When a price tag says $1 here, we know that will cost us just 75 cents in U.S. money. But we found things to be more expensive in Canada. Even the Canadian Dollar Store advertises, "Everything's $1.25." It seems that should be the Dollar and twenty-five cents Store, eh?

We also found that food at chain restaurants is more expensive. For example, a 12-inch sandwich at Subway that would cost $8 in the United States, cost us $12 in Canada. A Little Caesar Pizza that would cost $8 in the states, cost us $10 in Canada and was smaller than the U.S. pizza. Prices were even higher in the touristy areas. So we bought LOTS of food before we went into our first stop in Banff, and then cooked our way through the national parks.

When shopping for produce, we were very surprised to see fruit priced predominately by the pound. That might be because the prices in kilograms were very scary, eh?

We have also learned that terms like restroom or bathroom are not used in Canada. We learned to ask for the location of the washroom instead.

Our AT&T plan gave us a Canadian roaming bonus, that allowed us to make unlimited calls and texts while we were in Canada. That was great! But it limited us to 1 GB of data. So we got pretty good at finding free wifi sites throughout the country. Our most-used wifi was found at Tim Horton's, the national bakery chain. We tried everything in their bakery case during our many stops to their stores. Town visitor centers and national park offices also had wifi. Besides, who needs wifi when you have such beautiful places to explore, eh?

Because we were making so many purchases at Tim Horton's, we got their rewards card. After seven purchases, you get one free item. Denisa counts it as her biggest Canadian failure that she had only six purchases on her last reward card. She left her almost-finished card with the managers at our last campground. It was our farewell to Canada gift to them, eh?

Our motor home prefers 50 amp electric service, but we know how to function well with just 30 amp. That's a good thing, because all but one of our camp sites were 30 amp. You can probably find 50 amp in bigger and more expensive campgrounds in Canada, but traveling on a budget we were glad that we know how to live on 30 amp. The picture below doesn't have anything to do with 30 amp electricity, but that's a pretty view for lunch, eh?

We are also glad that we know how to live without television. We never have activated the satellite dish on the top of our motor home, as we have always gotten by with the over-the-air (OTA) channels that our antenna finds. We had good OTA stations in the first several campsites in southern Alberta, but we got zero OTA televisions for the last month of our trip. That's not a problem for us, but we would have enjoyed listening to the local news as that's another way to learn about the place you are visiting, eh?

After six weeks of living in Canada, we are now used to measuring distance in kilometers and temperatures in celsius. We've figured out formulas that we can calculate in our heads so we can convert back to the more complicated American system of measurement. But by the end of our trip we were thinking in metric instead of always converting. We knew that 21 degrees was a perfect weather day and a nice length hike was 10 kilometers. When you see a speed limit sign of 100, just remember that's really 62 MILES per hour.

While the United States is divided into states, Canada is divided into provinces. We traveled first north into Alberta, then came back south through British Columbia. We found that each provincial government has much control over such things as taxes and fees. It looks like British Columbia is a more expensive place to live and visit.

Buying fuel was one of our least favorite activities. We filled the motor home's 100 gallon tank in the United States right before we crossed the border. That meant we only had to fill up twice during our six weeks, but both of those times were painful. We found out that fuel is considerably cheaper in Alberta than British Columbia, so we made our second fill-up right before we crossed that provincial border. The price on the sign outside the filling station looks pretty good at $1.229. But we had to remember that was per liter--not per gallon. It takes almost 4 liters to make a gallon, eh? With the good exchange rate, we paid the equivalent of $3.13 and $3.52 per gallon for diesel while we were in Canada.

In the most touristy areas of Banff and Jasper National Parks, we saw more Asians than Canadians. Just like in the United States, the national parks have been over-ran with foreign visitors. This time we were one of those foreigners! We really enjoyed our time at less-popular places, where we got to interact with Canadians. They are wonderfully friendly and welcomed us to their country with open arms. We heard tidbits about their health care system and their political system, and we had some great conversations with our fellow North Americans. We heard some complaints that this summer was unusually cool and rainy, but we much preferred it to hot and smoky weather. We loved wearing jackets and pants this summer! We couldn't think of a better place to spend the summer of 2019, eh?