Visiting All of Canada’s Ten Provinces

At the time of writing I have achieved my goal of visiting every province in Canada; from the unique surfer idyll of Tofino on Vancouver Island,  the rugged coastline at Cape Spear in Newfoundland, even up to the frozen lakes of the Northern Territories. The only location that I wasn’t able to pass through was Nunavut; but if I had, I’d have no excuse to come back; I want an excuse, Canada is a fantastic country. The biggest take-away from my trip is scale. From taking off in London to the last point of my actual trans-Canada trip, I have travelled a distance greater than the distance around the circumference of the Earth, and I didn’t have to leave Canada to do it!

I can be sure of this distance total because I kept my Google Location History on for the entirety of the trip and manually added any places that I missed from when my devices were out of charge. This yielded the pretty cool (if I say so myself) map of my travels that you can see below. By pulling the data from my Location History page and applying the Haversine formula to get the distance between each point I got a total distance of 51,046 km. Taking the Wikipedia figure of equatorial circumference (40075.017 km), I get 1.27 times around the world. Not bad for a five month trip. I’ve also drafted a tutorial on how to do that, and have written up some PHP scripts that I’ll be open-sourcing soon.

I kept the “every province” goal under my hat, as I didn’t honestly think that it was possible on my timescale, and I stuck to my promise to myself that I would only move on to the next place once I was satisfied that I had seen what I wanted to in that location; I didn’t want my first trip to the second largest country in the world to be rushed. Now I’ve managed to visit every province in Canada (although only one of the two territories – I’m still calling that a “win”) I thought that it would be a good time to reflect on this beautiful and vast place. I’ve written some posts that will trickle out over the next few weeks, they are all under the “Canada” category, and I hope that you enjoy reading them.

If you don’t enjoy reading them, that’s fine too. Just send me some comment-abuse (any attention is good attention) and look at the pictures – there are a lot of them; I’ve taken over 15,000 since I got here…