I just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day - I'd been meaning to check it out ever since I bawled my way through the movie version a few years back. It's a lovely, subtle, tragic story about an old-school British butler, still working into his later years in the 1950s, and...

Touch comes first: the stifling but still pleasant sensation of being swaddled, of skin encased day and night in layers of tight-fitted fabric. I sleep in long johns, sweatpants, and a fleece shirt; I work in long johns, jeans, a hoodie and a fleece jacket; wool socks and sheepskin slippers are my...

Fort Nelson, British Columbia
Mile 300 of the Alaska Highway
58th Parallel
6:45 am

I wake up early and head out into a strange male world - all engine grease and flannel. There are truckers - and me - in the hotel breakfast room, truckers in the parking lot where I pace and scrape ice from the windshield...

There are parts of the world where the pure aesthetic appeal of the landscape is almost unrelenting - Scotland, say, or parts of the American Southwest. The Caribbean, and tropical islands everywhere. Areas where your camera finger itches non-stop, where you fight sleep on long train or bus rides...

So here I am again. Twenty-five years after our big yellow moving truck pulled into town after a four-day drive from Toronto - Dad driving, Mom in the passenger seat, me folded between them, probably clutching Pat the Bear. Twenty years since my Dad moved east again, to Ottawa, for work, and nineteen...

In about an hour I'll be hitting the highway on-ramp, heading west and north on the Trans Canada. Last night and this morning I kept waiting, expecting to get hit with a gut full of pre-trip nerves the way I do before a long flight to a new place - but so far, it hasn't happened. I'm not sure why....

It's getting really real, now. Yesterday I signed the papers on a 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and today I spent the afternoon digging through a hockey bag full of clothes I haven't touched since I packed up my apartment a year and a half ago. In less than three weeks I'll be on the road westbound, heading...

I've spent parts of the last two weekends researching a story on indie bookstores in small-town Eastern Ontario. (Yup, believe it or not, there are a few left.) Visiting these feisty little spots has been making me feel all gooey and emotional on a couple of levels: First, I love a good bookstore, and...

I've been out of school a few years now, but it still feels like September is a time for fresh starts. So this week, after 14 months of official hobo-dom, I've decided to turn in my suitcase and settle down like a respectable person again.

With one small catch: I'll be settling down in the Yukon. Which,...

Last night, my first back in Halifax, I couldn't sleep. Lay awake for hours in a friend's sixteenth-floor condo -- one with a view over the old stone campus and the women-only dorms where I, a lifelong champion sleeper, first learned sleeplessness eight years ago.

Back then, I used to give up and get...

My cousin Nathan and I had just paused for lunch on a wide scree slope above a fast-moving, silty creek. We were halfway through a three-day hike, and I hadn't relieved myself since we left camp that morning. I squinted up the slope at the nearest bushes, easily 500 meters away, and grumbled out loud...

1. Near the rough "airstrips" built for the territory's many bush pilots, the roads are scattered with signs warning drivers to watch for low-flying planes.

2. Instead of County or Township lines, the miles are divided by Highway Maintenance Section and Wildfire Management Zone.

3. The roads are the...

Regrets, as the old song goes, I've had a few.

I'm always amazed (and, I'll admit, a little suspicious) of the "Just go! You won't regret a moment of it!" travel crowd, because for me, travel isn't this glorious, freeing, breaking-of-the-chains. Being on the move is certainly wonderful in many ways,...

For the first hour after I arrived in Skagway, I couldn't stop thinking about Boomtown.

As a young kid in Saskatoon I made a few visits to the Western Development Museum, and Boomtown was far and away my favourite exhibit. Consisting, as I recall it, of a reconstructed main street in a faux-frontier...

That needs to be said right off the bat. Nobody's on a weekend jaunt, here. On my first afternoon after landing, I flop in the hostel common room and ask the British man on the couch across from me what's he's up to. Turns out, he's just hitchhiked up from Vancouver, road-tripped the Top of the World...

It's been a catching-my-balance couple of weeks here in Ontario. I'm back at my folks' place outside Kingston again, crash-landing between trips as I've done on and off throughout the year since I gave up my apartment, and the tasks and the vibe are familiar. There are errands to be done -- the pharmacy,...

I've spent days trying to peg Saint Lucia, to fit it into the incomplete jigsaw puzzle that is what I've seen of the world so far, but the island stubbornly refuses to be defined.

It is less British, by far, than Barbados, its Commonwealth neighbor -- nicknamed "Little England" -- a half-hour flight east....

The first boat was a ferry: big, workmanlike, painted bright orange and green with rust showing through. It was already rumbling away from the dock when I arrived by taxi at the Kingstown shipping terminal in Saint Vincent. "Hurry, hurry!" my cabbie shouted as I hustled down the pier. "Come on!" the...

Dear Sir:

I am so glad to hear that you're enjoying your Caribbean vacation -- however, I have one small complaint. Is it really necessary to shout "FUCK ME! FUCK ME!" at the top of your lungs when whoever you are speaking to is quite clearly already fucking you?

Don't get me wrong: as I said, I'm...

I'm on the phone with a mid-range, mid-size, non-branded resort in Saint Lucia's busiest corner, Rodney Bay.

"Hi, I'd like to make a reservation?" I say to the woman on the line. "Really?" She replies. "Have you stayed with us before?"

"No -" I start to answer, and she cuts me off with an "Omigosh!...