This summer, Longer Hollow Legs and I took a 6-week road trip through our homeland. We camped every night (except for two – we desperately needed showers) and it was so lovely to see our beautiful country up close. Canada is so diverse: from prairies to mountains to glaciers to the tundra, there is so much to see and appreciate.
Through it all, this is some of what we ate and drank:
This is the load of groceries we bought before embarking on the trip. Ooh yah.Our first breakfast on the road! It would be more of the same later. Amazingly enough that jar of Nutella lasted the whole trip – I thought I would pound through it in one week.We stopped in Calgary to visit a friend (yay!) and check out Phil and Sebastian coffee (yum!)Breakfast is serious business when camping, especially if you are going to go for an 8-hour hike up a mountain that day, you got to start it off right!A favourite snack: herb and garlic cream cheese on vegetable crackers. Even when the cream cheese gets waterlogged from all the melted ice in the cooler, it still doesn’t go bad (yay for preservatives..?!?!) Before our trip I decided to treat myself to an Opinel folding knife; it has become one of my favourite possessions. The beautiful wood handle feels comfortable, and the weight of the knife is well balanced and substantial. I hope to take it on many more adventures.This is how Longer Hollow Legs makes our coffee while camping! It’s simple, requires little extra equipment than what we would bring anyway, and it makes a delicious cup of coffee that properly shows off the beans. When you are on the road for a long time, having little rituals like making coffee in the morning are so comforting.Look at that mushroom!!! We found this majestic creature in a campground in Hyder, Alaska. No, we didn’t eat it…but we did wonder about it.We hardly make pancakes at home…so making pancakes while camping was doubly special!Every so often we treated ourselves to breakfast in a restaurant – this was a lovely start to the day in Dawson, Yukon, to bolster our confidence before embarking on the gravelly (and legend would have it, treacherous) Top of the World highway. Suffice to say, eggs Benedict are good luck.After a few hours of stumbling around in the Arctic tundra, we treated ourselves to the Sorachi Ace by Brooklyn Brewery moments before it began weeping rain. We had been to Brooklyn a few months ago and weren’t able to try much of the local brew (too much other stuff to imbibe!) so in a strange twist of fate we found a bottle of this in a dodgy liquor store in Prince George, BC.After what proved to be the most informative and engaging interpretive hike in the tundra, we spent the rest of our time there pointing out and naming all the new flora we had learned about and picking crowberries, which are a great source of water on a hike if you happen to run out of some!It rained for all the five days that we were in Juneau, Alaska. Amazingly enough, all the locals were happy and didn’t complain once about the broody weather! We basked in their optimism mostly at the Rookery, a cafe/bistro in the middle of the historic downtown area. French toast with bits of maple-glazed bacon…how can you be unhappy with that served to you?Last year during our road trip we went wine tasting in California – so we figured it was time to make it a tradition and go wine tasting again, this time in the Okanagan Valley, BC. We did a vertical tasting of some wines at Black Hills – the same wine from consecutive years. It was enlightening to taste how the weather affected the wine so drastically from year to year.
And now we’re home – back to running water, a 4-burner electric stove, a full-size fridge, a grocery store down the street. I am so grateful for these modern conveniences, as well as for the experience of not having them. I’m still “digesting” the trip, but as I look through the pictures, I am certain I will remember it fondly.
