Icefields Parkway
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Canada.
Read MoreOld Quebec City
A closer look at one of Canada's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreTofino’s storm season
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Canada.
Read MoreI have never found a country that makes distance feel so honest. Canada does not perform its scale for you; it simply is enormous, and you either surrender to that or you don’t. I’ve driven the Icefields Parkway with glaciers pressing close on both sides, and I’ve sat in a Montreal bistro at midnight arguing about hockey with strangers who became friends by dessert. The cities are quietly cosmopolitan, the coastlines are cold and dramatic, and the interior holds more lakes than anyone has bothered to name. What stays with me is the pacing: nothing here rushes you, not the trains, not the seasons, not the people. You come for the Rockies and leave remembering a conversation in a diner in Nova Scotia.
Chapter One
The Rockies and beyond
Banff and Jasper get the postcards, and they earn them, but I’ve learned to linger past the viewpoints. The Icefields Parkway rewards patience: pull off where the crowds don’t, and you’ll find turquoise meltwater lakes with nobody else in sight. Further west, Vancouver Island trades granite peaks for temperate rainforest and grey whales breaching offshore. I once spent three days in Tofino doing nothing but watching storms roll in off the Pacific, which felt less like a vacation and more like a recalibration. The mountains don’t need embellishing; they just need you to slow down enough to notice the light changing on the rock faces through the day.
“Canada teaches you that silence is a kind of luxury, and it hands it out generously.”
Chapter Two
Cities with their own accents
Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City each speak in a different register. Toronto is brisk and international, its neighborhoods stacked with cuisines from every diaspora that settled there. Montreal moves to a French rhythm, all wrought-iron staircases and bagels that will start an argument with their Toronto cousins. Quebec City, walled and cobbled, feels closer to Normandy than North America until you order poutine at 2 a.m. I like arriving in one city and leaving from another by train, watching the language on the signage shift somewhere around Ontario’s eastern edge, a reminder that this country never settled on being just one thing.
The Short List
Do not miss in Canada
At a glance
Canada in numbers
- Capital
- Ottawa
- Language
- English, French
- Currency
- Canadian Dollar (CAD)
- Best time
- June to September
Did you know
Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined, over two million of them.