Resurrecting the Road Trip: Do it for your kids, or your inner kid

Article content

Is the road trip dead?

Canadians are noted for measuring distance by time: Calgary? That’s 36 hours away. Your cottage or campground might be 3 hours, 2 and a half if you’re Making Good Time. Road warriors see the arrival time on a navigational system as a challenge, not a prediction. You pull over for a driver switch and declare you shaved off two minutes, beat that.

Toyota sensed the road trip — from the shores of St. John’s Newfoundland to the opposite side of the country in Victoria, B.C. — would ignite the trekking passion in a passel of auto writers, and through us, hopefully you, too. Showcasing nearly all of the 24 vehicles they offer for sale in Canada, we passed the baton between six stages to cover 9,000 kilometres. Toyota has been selling and making vehicles in Canada for 60 years — a milestone in Japan called Kanreki, signifying five complete cycles through the Chinese zodiac. Toyota is a dragon.

Article content

Toggle full screen modePrevious Gallery Image

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

6. 

7. 

8. 

9. 

10. 

11. 

12. 

13. 

14. 

15. 

Next Gallery ImageToggle gallery captions

All 15 Photos for Gallery

Function Not Available

Full Screen is not supported on this browser version.

You may use a different browser or device to view this in full screen.

OK

I’ve been road-tripping for nearly all of my 60 years. First, as a wee prisoner in the back of the station wagon du jour as we traced my father’s path back to Saskatchewan from Ontario (as long as he thought the car could make it), and later, on my own in everything from cube trucks to minivans to sports cars to RVs. I watched the climbing price of gas curb familiar holiday patterns, I watched as cars became more reliable (no more sitting by the side of the road, hood launched skyward, the engine overheated) and the introduction of family haulers — first the minivans, then the luxurious SUVs as modern kids’ ears were stuffed with declarations that they had no idea how good they had it. 

Flying has become more accessible, but I will never fail to love the answers to one of my favourite questions: tell me about your best/worst road trip as a kid. (Seriously. Dump your tales in the comments.)

Article content

On our leg of the mission from North Bay to Winnipeg, I sent pictures of spectacular Lake Superior to my now-grown sons. It is aptly named, and it was a healthy reminder of the absolute glory of this country. When my kids were small, they missed out on some things for two reasons: I couldn’t always trust my aging car, and gas prices for a single Mom were a challenge. 

This time, I was driving six vehicles, all hybrids. The Toyota Corolla Cross, Crown Signia, Sequoia, Land Cruiser, Tundra, and the RAV4. The RAV4 was the 11 millionth Toyota built in Canada — at least that’s what the stickers (and conversation starters) on the door declared. 

Years ago, in a terrible experiment that taught me a lot, I hypermiled from Halifax to Vancouver for a story. We crawled across the country for about 10 days, sweltering in the heat, creating havoc while trying to protect our gas consumption, and pissing off the wonderful people of nearly every province as we did so. I think we managed to average about 5.5 L/100 km in a new sedan. The vastly larger RAV4 delivered 6.1 L/100 km for the hours I was driving it — safely and properly. Hybrid technology like this means we could start creating new road trip stories.

Article content

You should do the opposite of what my father did. The Trans-Canada highway is a gem, a tether that leashes this country together. But don’t race against the clock. Especially if you have kids, but even if you don’t, relish the bits and pieces of small outlets that give you big photo ops, like Wawa’s three geese (yes, there are three), the classic poses “holding” Sudbury’s big nickel (Echo Bay has a loonie), the Agawa Train in Sault Sainte-Marie, and memorials to Terry Fox.

Pro-tip: the best source for road trips is Atlas Obscura, long renowned for bringing you the most interesting, often goofy, sometimes gory, always rewarding information about anywhere in the world you find yourself. 

Article content

Anxious to get a jump on one day of the trip, I almost stupidly missed out on one of the best parts of it: a two-hour fishing excursion on Lake Charles in Sault Sainte-Marie, motoring out with Jake, our stalwart guide, to revisit my long-abandoned casting skills on a perfect day. What a glorious start to the morning, with or without a pickerel landing at my feet. 

Have you ever heard of Yooperlites? Neither had I. It’s a trademarked name, but essentially, they were recently discovered on the shores of Lake Superior, and are “stones mainly known for fluorescing, owing to the high sodalite content in the matrix of the stones.” Rocks that glow in the dark. You need a UV flashlight to find them on a beach at night. While the most successful places to hunt them are on the Michigan beaches of the lake, that didn’t stop me from buying a UV flashlight to bring along. Sault Sainte-Marie has been noted as a possible place to hunt these beauties, and no way was I going to get this close and not try.

Article content

We did not find any Yooperlites, but we told a handful of locals (who were looking at us like we were weirdos) about them, and I knew if I had kids I would have been sliding across the border and kitting them all out with UV lights and letting them stay up way past bedtime. If anyone has found some in Canada, please let me know! Sorry, but things like this are better than Disney World. Note: do not flash that light around your hotel room.

We were sobered as we came across a white pickup flung nose first down the grade, rear end pointing directly up. There are designated stretches of an additional passing lane on this two-lane tarmac, and it was a swift reminder that you best wait for one. Even then, if you run out the gap, pull back and remember you’re sharing this wonder that skirts around so much water and so much rock with semis as well as tourists. There is nowhere you have to get that is worth risking the hour we calculated it took oncoming first responders to reach the scene. No mulligans. 

Article content

There is always, always the fool who gambles with the curves and the oncoming traffic to gain all that time I just told you not to bother saving. And without fail, you will pull up beside them at the next rest stop because all animals drink from the same watering hole in these parts.

We put in long drive days, managed to balance the salty with the sweet, stashed water at every stop and even cleared it with our hosts to visit the most amazing Tomahawk Island Lighthouse on the shores of the gorgeous Lake of the Woods. Some things are worth a detour, and collecting experiences like this beats any trinket on offer. 

You can carve out loops on the Trans-Canada throughout Ontario to make a trip as long or as short as your travelling companions want, whether you’re camping or grabbing an inn. To Kenora, where most start their westward swing into Manitoba is 1,848 kilometres from Toronto — or 20 hours, as many of us would say. It’s about the same distance to Miami, yet you never leave Ontario. I can appreciate our access to much of the U.S. — Route 66 will forever be one of this road warrior’s favourite journeys — but whether you have a car or rent one (lots of unlimited mileage deals out there; make it a hybrid and save a ton on fuel), it might be time to consider the ultimate Canadian road trip.

Do it for the kids. You know how long the stories last. You’re still telling them. 

Sign up for our newsletter Blind-Spot Monitor and follow our social channels on X, Tiktok and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest automotive news, reviews, car culture, and vehicle shopping advice.