{"id":7883,"date":"2016-04-18T09:18:03","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T13:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/?p=7883"},"modified":"2020-06-23T12:13:50","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T16:13:50","slug":"life-on-the-road-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/life-on-the-road-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Life on the Road: Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tourists
Tourists at the Falls by Shane Kiefer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On a Sunday in late July, I set off for the trip of a lifetime with my boyfriend, Shane, and his friend, Patrick, from Germany.\u00a0 We were going to be on the road for about a month, making our way through destinations in the U.S. and Canada<\/a>.\u00a0 The route was roughly planned, and we were going to be joined by Patrick\u2019s friend, Helena, partway through, but the rest of it was a serendipitous adventure.\u00a0 We had no idea who we might meet or what oddities we would come across, but we were prepped and ready for life on the road.<\/p>\n

The first leg of the trip was to travel north from our starting point in Pennsylvania up to Niagara Falls, Canada.\u00a0 We reached the place no problem, spent the day gallivanting around the city, and at night returned to the falls to see them lit up beneath a show of fireworks.\u00a0 With rumbles of thunder and rain fast approaching, we thought for sure that the show would be cancelled\u2014but just as the lightning began to strike and the rain began to fall, the first of the fireworks shot into the air with a bang.\u00a0 We had the rare occasion of witnessing a lightning and fireworks show collide above us by the nighttime falls, lit with changing colors.\u00a0 Shane pulled out his camera and tripod to photograph the event while Patrick laughed heartily in his poncho, holding it out over Shane to help the camera from getting drenched.<\/p>\n

\"Niagara
Niagara Falls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Niagara
Niagara Falls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the end of it, ponchos didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 We were soaked through.\u00a0 As much as we could, we dried out inside the car.\u00a0 We had already set up tent at a campground oddly placed in the city, so we returned to camp and hunkered down in our sleeping bags.\u00a0 By morning the rain had mostly stopped, but we woke up in puddles, drenched even more than the night before.\u00a0 You would think such a crummy first night would be a bad omen for the trip to come, but we didn\u2019t care.\u00a0 Shaking out the tents and wringing out sopping clothes, we agreed we would travel on to Toronto and dry out our things in a hotel room.<\/p>\n

\"Fireworks
Fireworks and Falls by Shane Kiefer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In these first few days, we knew Patrick was going to be the designated child in the back seat.\u00a0 After hours of hearing him go on about how we needed to get \u201cbaubles,\u201d I only understood what he was talking about when he came out of a dollar store with a tube of bubbles.\u00a0 He had also purchased a pencil and notepad to write up a \u201cmust to-do\u201d list for our trip across America.\u00a0 On the way to Toronto, Patrick blew his bubbles, dried his clothes flapping outside the rear window, and began his \u201cmust to-do\u201d list which so far consisted of \u201criding horses in the west, surfing in California, and taking pictures on Route 66.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Queen
Queen Concert<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we finally reached Toronto<\/a>, we checked into a Hyatt and laid out our damp, musty clothes, taking turns to dry them out with the closet iron setup.\u00a0 In the meantime Patrick blew bubbles, the bathroom flooded, and we ate the messy dinner of sloppy joe BBQ we had packed in the cooler.\u00a0 We spent a lot of the day exploring the city, but the real gem of the day was when we found out that Queen and Adam Lambert would be putting on the last performance of their North American tour at the Air Canada Center.\u00a0 We had nosebleed standing area in the back of the stadium, but that didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 It was unexpected and amazing, and we all had a great time, even Patrick who had never heard of Queen (though Helena would give him grief for it later).<\/p>\n

The next day was another long one of exploring the city, seeing places I did not really care to see.\u00a0 Cities have their own kind of feel, fast-paced, busy, fun, and sociable\u2014all good, and all things that contribute to memorable experiences\u2014but I was ready for some wilderness.\u00a0 I could not wait to set up camp in the woods and under the stars.<\/p>\n

We were headed for the Great Lakes region next and nearly died when the GPS sounded that we had over 100 miles to travel on the first major highway.\u00a0 But we turned it into a game.\u00a0 Instead of \u201c100 bottles of beer on the wall,\u201d we all sang to a tune of \u201c100 miles to go on this road.\u00a0 100 miles to go. Take one down, pass it around, 99 miles to go on this road\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And so we went\u2014Patrick adding to his \u201cmust to-do\u201d list, Shane keeping his patience with the long drive ahead, and me in the passenger\u2019s seat doodling and writing in my sketch journal as the thick woods of Canadian pine passed by.<\/p>\n

July 30th 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

Today the clouds lay staggered like stepping stones to the sky\u2014thicker at the bottom of the horizon, smaller bits break away from the smooth mass and rise to the sun\u2014separated by a trickle of blue that permeates each stone of cloud.\u00a0 The sky is a deeper blue at the pole, straight up, than fades down to a paler blue at the edges of horizon.\u00a0 It is a stream and the clouds are pebbles, stones, boulders.\u00a0 A few lumber close to the tips of Canadian pine, heavy, so close to the fingertips of earth yet forever floating in the sea of sky.\u00a0 In the west they billow, great and white and full, like the sails of a ship that billow with the wind.\u00a0 And yet, from the east they stretch, long and smooth, like waves of ocean upon the shore at low tide.<\/em><\/p>\n

-Somewhere in Canada<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a Sunday in late July, I set off for the trip of a lifetime with my boyfriend, Shane, and his friend, Patrick, from Germany. We were going to be on the road for about a month, making our way through destinations in the U.S. and Canada. The route was roughly planned, and we were going to be joined by Patrick\u2019s friend, Helena, partway through, but the rest of it was a serendipitous adventure. We had no idea who we might meet or what oddities we would come across, but we were prepped and ready for life on the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":7885,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_type":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1244,1242,75],"tags":[551,886,562,920,921,15],"class_list":["post-7883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-canada","category-road-trips","category-travel-stories","tag-adventure","tag-canada","tag-hotel","tag-niagra-falls","tag-toronto","tag-travel","entry","has-media"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 13:53:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8015,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7883\/revisions\/8015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.budgetyourtrip.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}