Minor observations from driving 2500 miles through Canada

I’ve spent a surprising amount of time on Canada 2014. Five weeks in fact — which is 12.5% of the year so far. First for three weeks in February, in Northern Ontario and Toronto, and then in September for two weeks driving between Halifax and Wasaga Beach, via everywhere in between.

So it is with this authority that I bring you ten minor cultural observations about life in Canada compared to Britain.

Open Flags

As we were driving through Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick I started to notice something unusual: There were dutch flags everywhere. Which was weird because if anything, the people around there were Acadians — Francophone people who were a mixture of colonists and first nations… and their flag is the French flag with a yellow star on it.

As Canadian Liz later explained to me, the red, white and blue flags were in fact flags to signify that a shop is open — something that seemed so obvious to her she didn’t think to mention it, yet was a cultural marker that I was completely oblivious too. It’s like coming to London and standing on the left on an escalator.

Interestingly too, these flags seemed more common in the eastern provinces — once we were into Quebec and Ontario, they became less common. How strange.

The car is king in Canada

When we arrived in Halifax we went to pick up our rental car, to discover that we’d been upgraded to an SUV. Given my driving experience until this point has been almost entirely in a Ford Ka, this was a bit intimidating to say the least.

Peg board signs are everywhere

You know what I mean — sign posts where the letters can easily be changed. Whilst we only tend to get them on old fashioned cinemas, they are everywhere in Canada. From drug stores, to supermarkets, to churches. The best of the latter I saw in a town just out of Ottawa said “Not just cars are recalled by their maker”.

It is pretty startling to consider that they just don’t exist in this country — I mean, there’s no good reason for it, right?

Highways have big gaps down the middle — for a good reason

In a brilliant piece of design which isn’t entirely obvious if you’re British, Canadian highways unlike motorways are not usually split by merely a metal central reservation, but huge gaps filled by grass. In many places, the gap is so wide that you can’t see the lane going in the other direction.

The reason for this, of course, is that Canada gets a lot of snow in the winter — so the snow ploughs need somewhere to dump what they scoop up from the roads. Excellent planning there, whoever designed that.

You can take some really nice long exposure photos

There’s a lot of countryside in Canada, with very little light pollution so unlike in London you can actually see stars at night. Which means that it is possible to take some absolutely stunning exposures with just a normal DSLR camera, like this:

Bus drivers keep their buses at home

Driving through Canada, it was impossible not to look at all of the massive houses and not feel intense jealousy. Living in London, my flat is approximately the size of a shoebox — but in Canada, there’s enough room for everyone to have palatial homes with massive gardens. And here’s the crazy thing: People have driveways and gardens that are so large, if you’re a school bus driver, it is much easier just to park at home and set off from there, rather than at the bus depot. Big houses in Canada aren’t a rich millionaires thing — this is routine, after all, for bus drivers.

Skunks really stink.

If you’re driving hundreds of miles on the Canadian highway, you can only go so far before your nose follicles are disturbed by an unusual scent. Whilst the sensation only lasts for a few seconds when you’re doing 110kph in New Brunswick (or 100kph in Quebec) it is definitely memorable.

It turns out, as Liz explained to me, that Pepe Le Pew wasn’t much of an exaggeration — skunks really do stink. A skunk being hit by a car is very much the same as setting of a stink bomb.

Cruise control makes driving almost too easy

I took nearly two years to pass my driving test. Even if I can blame my first driving instructor for being terrible (as well as distressingly racist), I have to admit that I was generally pretty hopeless too. But many years later and I’m fine on British roads — but I had some apprehension about driving on the wrong side of the road.

Luckily, the people who build Canada made things much more user friendly and driving in Canada is an absolute breeze. Cruise control is something of a revelation too. Though it is a bit of a weird sensation at first to lift your foot off of the gas and still have the car belting along at 100kph, you quickly get used to it. It’s really useful too — because if you encounter a steep hill (there are a few…), the car itself will maintain speed so without you doing anything it’ll kick in the engine and push hard to go up to the top. All whilst you’re sitting in the passenger seat chilling out. Brilliant.

Road trips are improved by local radio

One of the big things that helped us get a real sense of place on the long drive between Halifax and Wasaga was tuning into local radio. We bought a bunch of CDs with us but they barely got a listen when Canadian commercial radio offered up a diet of vaguely familiar tunes and local chit-chat. The only slightly distressing thing was that every time we found a station we liked, it inevitably turned out to be the local “oldies” station. I’m only 27 — I thought I had a few years of relevance left in me yet.

Whilst a lot of the radio was clearly centrally controlled and playlisted and all of that sort of thing, there was still enough local content — we heard one show being broadcast from a music festival in downtown Halifax as we drove towards Prince Edward Island, and had Huntsville’s station read out the local obituaries. Ottawa’s breakfast host had mastered the “morning zoo” format, sliding easily between hard and soft news with his co-presenters.

CBC Radio was also great. As we drove through Algonquin Provincial Park we listened to a debate between a New York Magazine and an Atlantic columnists on the philosophical nature of the guilty pleasure. Don’t worry, though I really enjoyed it I realised that, like when I read the New Yorker on the plane hope, it probably makes me the worst person in the world.

In what turned out to be a strange coincidence, I remember hearing a trail for a CBC show that would have Stephen Fry as a guest the next week, only to fly home to London and go to the BBC to do my regular weekly radio punditry slot on the BBC Asian Network and find Stephen Fry leaving the studio I was entering… having just recorded the very programme I’d heard trailed thousands of miles away.

Junction naming is brilliant

Okay so this isn’t the most exciting thing but it is some more brilliant road design. On British motorways, exits are numbered in sequence which works fine until you build an extra one in between two existing junctions, in which case we end up with stuff like Junction 1A and so on.

In Canada they’ve come up with a far more sensible solution: Naming junctions after the distance markers. So Exit 10 is 10km along the road, Exit 25 is 25km along, and so on. And distance markers have been placed every kilometer. This means that if you’re driving along and know what junction you’re looking for, you can do the maths and work out exactly how far you’ve got left to go. Brilliant.

Fries are skin-on by default

Nine times out of ten in Canada, if you order fries they will be of the skin-on variety that are perceived as marginally more elite over here. Even fast-food places like Wendy’s and A&W serve with skin on. I guess Canada must have a shortage of potato peelers or something?

Pizza by the slice is available everywhere

Now I’m a big fan of pizza, so this was one of my favourite things about Canada. Though Britain has more than its fair share of fried chicken shops and other fast food takeaways, Canada is king when it comes to takeaway pizza. Not only can you order pizza from tonnes of places (even Subway sell it) but many places sell it by the slice. I live in London, a city of eight million people and only know of maybe four places (all around Leicester Square) that do this — in Canada, it is hard to walk along any urban street and not see pizza slices for sale. Brilliant.

In fact, so much does Canada love pizza that Halifax even has a famous junction known as “Pizza Corner” on the corner of Blowers and Grafton, which used to be home to three (now two) pizza places, all on different sides of the cross-roads. Apparently when there was a G7 summit that ended with the assembled world leaders heading down there for a slice.

Petrol pumps work differently

Can you tell we spent a lot of time on the road? In many gas stations, if you didn’t have some pump it for you, you’d have to put in your credit card into the chip and pin machine at the pump, specify how much petrol you want and then after paying the gas would be pumped in. Which is actually a rather good idea.

Going to a diner for breakfast is cool

The British greasy spoon, though an institution just doesn’t cut it compared to a diner. You get a booth, like in films —which is perfect for conspiring. Just think — me and Liz in the photo above could be about to exchange some information that would blow the lid off of the next Watergate or something. Though as it turns out in the end we just had breakfast.

Eating whilst driving is an art-form in Canada

If you don’t have time to stop for breakfast then don’t worry — Canada has a wide range of drive-through options, including not just dining but also drive through bank ATMs and I’m sure I even saw a drive through beer store.

In any case, being able to drive, drink a coffee and stuff a donut down your throat at the same time appears to be standard practice. Whilst it might be difficult for British roads where there’s twists, turns and no cruise control, in Canada you’d probably be fine having a three course meal as long as you glanced up at the road occasionally.

Everyone is happy

Finally, the overwhelming sense I got from Canada is pretty much a massive cliche: Literally everyone is friendly, nice and seems happy.

After stepping off of the aeroplane in Halifax and getting to the car rental place, the woman who worked there sounded like she loved her job and was enthusiastic in getting our car sorted. When we went into the car park and went to the portacabin to grab the keys, the person in there was also beaming with smiles and was chatty. In London, by contrast, the most you’d get is probably a grimace and a sigh.

This continued for the whole trip — literally everyone we encountered was a delight. I know stereotyping people is bad, but hey, there must be something in the water there.

The only slightly grumpy person we met in our entire two weeks in Canada — and I mean, she was only slightly grumpy — was the woman who worked in the Accordion Museum. That’s right — there’s actually an accordion museum and it isn’t just some sort of wheeze.

Canadians are nice almost to the point where you feel awkward for not being so relentlessly friendly. The nicest person we met (and it was a tough competition) was probably in our B&B in the village of Alma, NB we got up early to set off before breakfast was due to be served. But hearing us wake up, the B&B owner insisted on making us breakfast anyway, and asked us about our trip. In Britain if anyone was that cheery at 7 in the morning you’d think there was something wrong with them.

So that’s some of the things that I noticed on the road in Canada. Now you can go read some of my top hidden tourist spots in Canada.