O Canada: A Love Story

And Montreal is my favorite city in the world. Crafting ideal days is part of my travel-writer job description, yet I can only lay claim to one perfect urban day of my own, and that was in Montreal. The day began with a pain au chocolat at Boulangerie le Marquis in Vieux-Montréal (the stone-facade district of corset-tight cobblestone streets), then continued with a 25-mile bike ride along and beyond the Lachine Canal and a matinee NHL hockey win by my beloved Montreal Canadiens against the Pittsburgh Penguins. That evening, I attended the opera Tosca, performed by Opéra de Montréal at Places des Arts, ate oysters, steak tartare and duck confit at Liverpool House and eventually danced the night away at Le Rouge Bar in the Plateau, former home of my favorite musician, Leonard Cohen. 

In the great outdoors

The birch forests outside Quebec City are perfect for fat-tire biking.

Magalie Boutin

My devotion to Canada extends far beyond any city’s boundary, even Montreal’s. I could pack a calendar year with ideal outings in the Canadian wilderness. On a multiday canoeing excursion on Lake Kipawa in Quebec, I disappeared through granite-walled passageways that revealed secret bodies of water where loons called and butterflies flitted overhead. In Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, a mountain-biking adventure in Maligne Canyon began beside water dressed in a stunning shade of blue, and cliff diving added to the thrills. A white-water rafting trip on the Tatshenshini River first began with kayaking the Yukon River, at one point involved a ferry from Haines to Skagway, Alaska, and concluded at a solstice party in Whitehorse after traversing British Columbia’s legendary White Pass.

And that’s just summer fun. I discovered my journalistic calling card — winter adventure — in the Great White North, where people carve ice sculptures on a frozen Lake Louise in the Rockies and navigate more than 8,000 acres of skiable terrain in Whistler. I admit ice fishing on a frozen lake in Alberta was not my thing, but fat-tire biking on a track outside Quebec City was an absolute blast. Since then, each pedal through the Canadian pines leaves me plotting another bi-wheeled excursion.

Winter camaraderie and morning booze

Two more reasons I’m under Canada’s spell: après and the Caesar cocktail. As any snow bunny will tell you, après is shorthand for “after skiing.” In Canada, that revelatory period means gorging on massive platters of poutine and quaffing pitchers of IPA with fellow snow-sport junkies. And then there’s the holy grail of northern cocktails, the Caesar, a spicy Bloody Mary made with Clamato juice.

As an adult, by the way, I eventually did see wolves outside Churchill, Manitoba, as well as polar bears. I don’t know if any wildlife lover is prepared to see their first wolf. You can’t really believe your eyes when you do, and you can’t look away. Grizzly sightings in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest were just as riveting. Even watching a marmot leap an alpine creek set among wildflowers in British Columbia’s Bugaboo Mountains ignited a chill. It was like I’d somehow sneaked behind a curtain to where the wild things are, a red-and-white cotton curtain with a maple leaf embroidered squarely in the middle, not unlike the blanket onto which my mom sewed all my team patches from playing hockey in mythical Canada all those years ago.