Canada’s love affair with camping waxes and wanes. A decade ago it was one of the country’s preferred holiday choices, now numbers are down, but rising again. The reasons are not always obvious—it’s partly to do with costs, no doubt, and perhaps partly the need for campsites to keep up with holiday makers’ expectations. Whatever the reason, it is still a holiday that attracts many, especially families. So where can you head to get back in touch with your environment?
Back to Nature
Canada boasts some of the greatest nature reserves of the world, and what better way to experience them than to sleep, cook, and eat outdoors?
If water is your thing, you can’t do much better than the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve in B.C. There are miles of beaches, but also inland walks with rivers and waterfalls. The rainforest trail is a world of ancient trees, unusual plants, and woodland wildlife. For the more enthusiastic, the West Coast Trail takes in all the different aspects of the area.
The Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in Alberta is a place of great beauty equipped with many fine campsites, from the comfortable to the rugged. Walking in the Park is a great way to meet up with bears, elk, moose, and even cougars and lynx.
Get Away from It All
You can really make the most of Canada’s wildest spots with a sturdy 4×4 like the Jeep Compass, but even without one there are still remote places you can get to.
Grasslands National Park is in the vast open prairies of Saskatchewan. The sense of space and the awareness of your own smallness that you can get from these magnificent lands just have to be experienced. They are a reminder of what large tracts of Canada were once like when the bison herds roamed.
For a really quiet location with not many visitors, you could try Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. It has hikes where you can walk for miles through beautiful countryside with only the birds for company, or you could enjoy hours of undisturbed fishing. It’s also a great location for canoeing.
See Some Action
Nearly all of Canada’s remoter campsites provide plenty of hiking, but some offer other activities to keep all the family tired and happy.
Prince Edward Island has everything for an active family holiday. There are beaches, pools, fishing and golfing sites, and plenty of scope for biking and hiking. There’s no shortage of cultural diversions as well.
Ontario’s Killarney Provincial Park, with its beautiful lakes, has enough boating, canoeing, and kayaking to keep water babies happy for days.
The Great Outdoors
There are so many great camping locations in Canada that it is hard to know where to look first. Wherever you are in Canada there is going to be a good campsite in beautiful surroundings near you, so there is no need to go far. A camping holiday can refresh the spirit of the whole family.
Author: Adam Singh loves travel, from the planning to the daydreaming to the actual ‘We’re Here’ moment! He has traveled around the world extensively on solo trips and now enjoys taking his family out on adventures both home and away.