The Longest Road Trip

The term 'Road Trip', with its sense of excitement and adventure, isn't a term much used in Britain, probably because our roads are so congested that any name that suggests pleasure is inappropriate. So we only learned the true meaning of a road trip when we were visiting our son in Canada, where the Canadians travel with great pleasure on their many miles of quiet and well-maintained roads.

We experienced our first road trip on our first holiday in Canada in 2006, when we drove from Edmonton Alberta all the way across the Rockies and Cascades and other mountain ranges to Seattle in Washington State, USA. We didn't go by the most direct route, and we didn't keep a record of our distance travelled, so I estimate we probably did about 800 miles in the four days.

It wasn't a trip without problems, the worst of which was when I hit a curb and wrote off a wheel hub. Hertz didn't have a spare in their Jasper office so they gave us a replacement car - so we left our small Japanese car there, swapping it for the pleasure of a big Ford Explorer.

The worst experience of the trip was travelling along interstate 5, a road of gigantic potholes and huge trucks, which runs north-south through the back of Seattle, and which would have swallowed the small car we started with.

Good as it was to spend time with my brother and his family in Seattle, I was sorry to see the road trip's end. So, when we returned to Canada in 2008 we hired a car which....

....learning from past experience, was even bigger than the Explorer, and repeated our road trip. It was as well we had a powerful car as sections of our route, such as this part over the Cascades, were closing for the season, so the trip was even more of an adventure than the 2006 one.

We did many more road trips on subsequent visits to Edmonton, none of them as long as the two to Seattle. We won't be doing another. It's not that the idea doesn't appeal: I'd happily do another road trip - as long as someone else drove. It's because we're unlikely to travel to Canada again.