Until my second year in University, I had only traveled within BC and Alberta -- the two provinces in which I have lived my entire life. My choir tour that year took me through Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, a reeeeeeeally long day driving around the North end of the Lakes, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kitchener, London, a bunch of small Ontario towns, a bunch of puny Manitoba towns and Saskatchewan towns, and Saskatoon, all withing two weeks. We started and finished in Edmonton of course. I saw the Terry Fox monument in... someplace, Niagara Falls of course (funny story about that), the CN Tower (the glass floor is funky), the Skydome (go Jays!), Younge Street, the St. Paul cathedral and the storybook zoo in London, vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the fine fine powder sand on the shore of Lake Huron (I'd only seen much coarser sand in my life before that point) and many, many glimpses of the USA across vast bodies of water. I got a tour of a cheese factory, too. I also sang lots, with it being choir tour and all.
That journey really drove home what I had always known:
Canada is really big. I mean really I only went halfway across. And mostly along the south portion. I would really like to make the same trip again only with more time. And not during a drought. Saskatchewan and most of Manitoba are basically endless seas of dead brown flat stuff during a drought.
Aside from that one trip, and another a few years later just to Manitoba (man Moose Jaw practically rolls up its sidewalks at 5pm), I've gone around BC a whole lot and Alberta almost as much (although I've still not been to the Badlands). Oh and my right arm has been in Washington State. Illegally. The rest of me stayed in BC.