Every July 1st, Canada Day rolls around a little quicker than the year before. The long days we’ve waited for all year have an ironic effect of making the season shorter, because winter is great and all, but summer is when the Canadian Bucket List BBQ really starts cooking.  The national and provincial parks, the festivals, the lakes, the hiking, biking, canoeing, and other ings you can think of. I missed Canada Day last year as I was on a one-year adventure with my family.   We travelled the far and wide of Australia for six months, doing as much as we could for my book,  The Great Australian Bucket List. Then we lived for a while in Thailand, Bali and Vietnam (you can read all about that if you wish), popping into Singapore and New Zealand for good measure. I can assure you, you miss Canada when it’s gone.

For all the comments that Australia is Canada with better weather, I discovered this is not at all the case. Are there historical similarities? Most certainly. Both have colonial hangovers, the Australians even more so with the Union Jack still part of their national flag (it’s 2019, don’t you think it’s time to move on, mate?)   Both treated their indigenous populations like fodder, and both have done too little and never enough to make that right.   Both are surrounded by ocean (especially if you consider the United States an Ocean of Political Disappointment). Both have relatively small populations with relatively gigantic tracts of land.   The Canadian Arctic is a pretty hostile environment, as is the Australian Red Centre. One country is famously hot, the other famously cold.   One has a marsupials, the other has bears (the koala is certainly not a bear).   Both love sport, and both sport endless natural beauty.   We have many of the same chocolate bars and burger chains (Hungry Jacks is Burger King, in case you were wondering), the same dominating commercial multinationals, the same insecurity about larger, wealthier and more ambitious geopolitical neighbours (spare a thought for poor New Zealand).  I could go on, and one day I probably will.

For now, let me paint why Canada is not Australia, using a broad brush of generalizations. Please don’t look at my strokes too carefully, as you’ll see paint is all over the place…it’s really more of an abstract piece. Because of course Vancouverites are not Newfoundlanders, and those who live in Perth are a different kettle of kangaroo from those who live in Alice Springs. Still, Canadians, by and large, are milder, cool as their weather. Australians are rarely accused of being over-polite, and an Australian will sooner bear hug you than apologize.   Canadians are more reserved, and barring the extremes, tend to be a little more reasonable.   I was once pulled over by a traffic officer in New Brunswick racing way over the speed limit to chip factory. Did you know one-third of all the commercial French fries used worldwide come from Canadian potatoes? Did you know that up to 90% of all the global mustard seed - the stuff used to create your favourite French Dijon - are Canadian?   I pleaded with the cop, and he let me off. The people of New Brunswick are friendly to a fault. Driving north up the remote coast of Western Australia, I was doing the speed limit when a cop appeared out of nowhere and pulled me over. He told me I was ten kilometres over the speed limit because I was pulling a trailer. I told him I’m Canadian and had no idea that was a law, because nobody told me. There wasn’t another car in hours on the bullet straight Bruce Highway, and with kids in the back, I assured him I’d just set the cruise control to ten kilometres slower. He still gave me a hefty ticket.   I just know, in my maple leaf bones, no Canadian traffic office would ever have done that.     Australians are obsessed with rule of law. Cameras everywhere, enforcers ready to pounce.   Both are secure societies with some of the least corruption anywhere in the world.   But you feel the law in Australia, and they know it.

​I am a South African who wrote a bestselling book about the joys of Canada, and a Canadian who wrote a bestselling book about the joys of Australia.   I feel I have a grasp on both these cousin nations, at least as much as my experience allows.   I think my parents back in Vancouver were worried that my wife and I would fall in love with Australia, and decide to settle there.   Admittedly, we loved Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth (Melbourne and Sydney were way too busy and far too expensive to even consider).   But we’re a faithful lot and have already given our hearts to the country that famously opens it doors to those, like us before them, who seek a better life. Canada is a country that isn’t walling itself off, instead choosing to embrace the global, multicultural spirit of our age. Canada is a country with problems (every country has problems) and a country that can and must do better (every country can and must do better). Canada  recognizes the unequivocal right of same-sex couples to marry, that the war on drugs will never be won if you don’t take a different approach, and that no future can be attained without addressing the needs of the past through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.   Australia isn’t quite there yet, but that’s OK. Each sovereign nation is on its own unique journey.   This July 1, I’m just really glad that my own journey is in a country that flies a red maple leaf.   Also, and I needn’t remind you, the Raptors.

We are just minutes into the rally, and I’m clutching onto some key advice:

• It doesn’t help if you’re on time, but off course.
• Race your own rally.

I’m also clutching a clipboard, as I call out instructions from the passenger seat in Dave's 1964 silver Porsche 356.   His car is effortlessly hugging the pastoral roads of the Oregon countryside,  Number 43 in the annual Monte Shelton Northwest Pacific Classic Car Rally.   Based in Portland, it’s the oldest classic car rally in the USA, drawing drivers from as far afield as Colorado and BC.   It took us eight hours to drive from Vancouver to the starting line, but I had learned my first lesson when it comes to rallies:  These people love their cars, and they love to drive them. 
 
Dave, my rally Obi-Wan, is a case in point.  He’s the owner of over a dozen classic cars, including a pre-war Bentley and Rolls Royce.  That’s pre World War 1.    A 25-year rally veteran, Dave’s run the Peking to Paris (twice), along with rallies in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.   For the Northwest Classic, open to pre-1981 collector cars, Dave’s selected his reliable 356 Porsche.  He explains it will allow him to focus on the race, as opposed to keeping the car going.   Race is not exactly the right word.   It’s more like a Sunday drive, with two hundred good friends, and a purpose. 
 
Crawling along the I5 to Portland, Dave gives me the basics of time-speed-distance rallying.   Drivers and navigators are given instructions that must be followed to the letter, and to the second.  Each car is spaced one minute apart, driving at suggested speeds to enable us to reach, say, a particular stop sign in exactly 2:43 seconds, or a right turn at 7:29.   Teams calibrate their odometers, and must factor traffic and rally rules.  We never exceed the speed limit, unless we’re running late, in which case, well, these are classic sport cars.
 
The Rally Master adds traps designed to bamboozle even the most alert navigator, steering us off course, resulting in time penalties or lost minutes.   Each day might feature up to 10 stages, comprised of a start, finish, and time check by a team of volunteer marshals hidden somewhere along the route.   Dave warns me that it doesn’t help to follow the car in front of us.  They could just as easily lead us off a cliff as to the next checkpoint.

I’ve cage dived with crocodiles, hung off the side of holy mountains in China, and vacationed in Chernobyl, but here’s the truth:  the thought of travelling for the first time with my 4 year old daughter Raquel and 9-month old son Galileo terrified me. Curly-haired Raquel seems to have fallen Obelix-like into a cauldron of Red Bull, she’s a T4 bull in a china shop of tranquillity. Gali is newly teething, crawling, and hasn’t seen a hazard he hasn’t wanted to wrap his gums or baby carrot fingers around.   Still, it’s time to break them in, because with a Dad like me, travel is in their future.  So I thought I’d start somewhere easy and beautiful, spreading a couple weeks over a range of accommodation options.  Expectations are the death of travel, and yet toddlers are particularly gifted when it comes to ensuring that no high hope is trampled under the weight of their hyper-emotional little piggies.     

The Flight
No matter how great your toddler vacation is, the reality is it will be bookended by a plane ride three stories up from hell.   I fly a lot.  It’s my chance to work, read, watch a movie, daydream at altitude.   A six-hour direct flight from Vancouver to Maui should be nothing.  If the kids sleep.  To stack the odds in my favour,  I reached out to Fly-Tot, who sell an inflatable legroom pillows.  We’d be flying in late at night.    How bad could it be?   Bad.  Real bad.  Gali is chewing on the tray tables and seatbelts (and you know how often they get cleaned).  Raquel is vibrating with kicks and punches.  Rather than sleeping, the kids are using the Fly-Tot as a trampoline.   Playing Frozen on the iPad worked, but it only worked once, and then Raquel... let it go.  Like condemned prisoners at a public hanging, my wife and I gaze into the eyes of fellow toddler parents, dealing with the trauma of their own journey.  Each minute of each hour has the weight of a cannonball.   So frazzled by the experience, I commit a cardinal travel sin and forget our two bottles of duty free liquor – blessed late night Scotch/Baileys escape  - on the plane.  Air Canada’s cleaning staff relieve us of the bottles no more than five minutes after we deplane and I remember the forgotten bag.  “Sorry sir, our cleaners didn’t find anything.”   Aloha to them. ​

​Car Rental
Welcome to Maui!   Grab our bags and shuttle to the car rental, and spend 45 minutes in a late night line-up.  Now the kids want to sleep.  I push two chairs together and Raquel passes out.  I feel like Parent of the Year.   Get the van, install the car seats, strap in the kids, load in the luggage.  It’s a 45-minute late night drive in the rain to Wailea.  Could anything be worth this?   

The Fairmont Kea Lani
Yes, waking up on the 7th floor in a Deluxe Ocean View suite at the Fairmont Kea Lani is definitely worth it.  The sun sparkles off the Pacific.  Koi swim in ponds amidst manicured gardens and clear azure pools.  Coconut trees rustling in warm tropical air as sweet as nectar.  Stripped of the jeans and hoodies we won’t see for the next two weeks, the family hums with travel buzz.  We chomping at the bit of a beach vacation.   Out feet touch the reddish sand of Polo Beach, and then it starts: 
“I don’t want to go to the sea Daddy!”  Oh look, Gali has a fistful of sand in his mouth.  “It’s too hot Daddy!”  “It’s too cold Daddy!”  “I’m hungry!”  “I’m not hungry!”  “Where’s my blue spade?”  “I want a red spade!”  “I want what that other girl has!” “Pick me up!”  “Put me down!” “This rock is scary!” “I want to go to the pool!”    Toddlers are complex algorithms that dance to a convoluted rhythm only they can hear.   The first chance we have to relax is much later that night when both kids are asleep.  No late night walks on the beach for us, but we do sip cocktails on our patio, beneath a planetarium of stars, a scene scored by the soporific sound of crashing waves.     The flight is a distant memory.   Aloha Maui.  Finally, aloha.

Road Trip
The bucket list drive in Maui is the road to Hana, a hairpin-winding track alongside soaring ocean cliffs.    We made three turns and turned around, avoiding the projectile backseat vomit we knew would follow.  This pretty much ruled out a drive to the Haleakala volcano crater too, which I’ll have to get to once the kids are a little older.  We did drive to Makena Beach where Raquel flew a kite for the first time.  I brought it from home and she didn’t want to do anything except fly that kite.  She flew it for exactly 34 seconds, and never wanted to see it again.  We drove up to Twin Falls and got some great photos amidst the giant bamboo and dual cascades.     The Banyen Tree in Lahaina is unlike any tree I’ve ever seen, sporting 16 trunks and a block-wide canopy.  We ate lunch in the Flatbread Company in Paia, after which I lost my wife and daughter in the shops.   Raquel was having an allergic to reaction to her all-natural sunblock or the heat or the seawater, or something the Internet told us could probably be treated with a little Benedryl.  New parents would spend a day in a local hospital, only to be told to use a little Benedryl.   Fortunately we’re over the paranoia and worry that accompanies the firstborn.   Instead we visit Baby Beach where the full-face snorkel mask I bought for Raquel is thoroughly enjoyed by all other kids on the beach.   They tell me it works like a charm. 

It's not every day you find yourself walking the streets of a Bavarian town located deep in the Cascadia mountains of eastern Washington State.   Mind you, it’s not the first time I’ve seen a German village manifest thousands of miles from Europe.  In Brazil, there’s a town called Blumenau which has a similar look and feel of Washington’s Leavensworth, but a far more German-ey sounding name.   Both towns have a manicured appearance and attractions that is somewhat charming and a little sinister. My friend Jon described Leavensworth as “a Joseph Goebbels designed Disneyland.”     Fortunately, we’re not here for the schnitzel, which regrettably, wasn’t worth writing about anyway.   We’re on a road trip to the Channeled Scablands, site of what once the planet’s largest-ever waterfall.
 
Picture a five-foot brick wall.  Place a penny on it, and that would be the size of Niagara Falls compared to the cataclysm of water that flooded Dry Falls during the last ice age.   There are a number of theories as to what caused this massive flood, and it took decades for one particularly determined geologist named J Harlen Bretz to convince the scientific community that the aquatic destruction in northern Idaho, northwest Montana and southern Washington was simply unprecedented. Did the walls of an ice dam break, unleashing the flood?  Did a comet strafe the polar ice caps, causing a sudden melt that not only resulted in the world’s largest waterfalls, but inspired the ancient stories of Noah's Ark and Atlantis?  I contemplate this standing on an extended viewing point overlooking Dry Falls, a canyon stretching 3.5 miles wide and dropping 400 feet. Ten thousand years ago, the surf was up.  When it comes to geological wonders, you have to use your imagination, although illustrations in the adjacent visitor centre paint a vivid picture of 100ft waves smashing into the plains.  Water picked up giant rocks and dropped them like seeds hundreds of miles away.   Incredibly, people and animals were living in this area at the time.    If any survived, how would they have described such an event?  The end of the world?   Punishment from the gods?  There are over a dozen Native American flood myths which describe exactly that.  Some of them include a great ship built by an honest and noble man to save two of every animal.  Sound familiar?