Writer offers a bucket list for travelling in Canada
On a hot summer day, Robin Esrock likes nothing better than bobbing down British Columbia’s Penticton River Channel on a tube, sipping contraband wine from the cooler.
“It’s just such an amazing, civilized, floaty experience,” said the author of The Great Canadian Bucket List.
“That’s why I put it in the book under quirky, underrated activities. It’s so great and so easy to do. I mean you can rent the tube from Coyote Cruises or you can bring your own tube. And at the end of the channel, they give you a ride back to where you started in an old converted school bus.”
The only similar experience Esrock has had in the world, and he’s visited 109 countries, is a tube ride down the Mekong River in Loas where they stopped at waterfront shack restaurants for beer rather than pulling Okanagan wine from the cooler.
Being a South African who now lives in Vancouver, travel writer extraordinaire Esrock has spent many a summer in the Okanagan houseboating, sipping wine, cycling and hiking. That’s why he’s included all those outings in his new book, which has the sub-title One-of-a-Kind Travel Experiences (Dundurn Press). All 400 pages of the book describe 115 bucket list trips and activities Esrock has done across this great and gargantuan country of ours.
Other bucket list activities range from the simple and accessible, like biting into Montreal’s best smoked meat sandwich to the more esoteric harvesting an iceberg to make a Newfoundland cocktail.
In between there’s tracking the Spirit Bear in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, ziplining over a giant waterfall in New Brunswick, digging for dinosaur bones in Alberta’s Badlands and tundra hiking under the midnight sun in Nunavut.
“This isn’t a guide book,” he said. “It’s an inspirational book.”