British Columbia Road Trip with the Honda Passport
Miss604 is a long-time Honda Canada partner. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author.
There are two British Columbias: one where glass and steel soar amidst walkable neighbourhoods filled with trees and bustle and din, and the one you only see when rubber hits the road.
British Columbia Road Trip with the Honda Passport
No matter how much you explore the cities and towns of British Columbia, oftentimes it’s the in-between you never forget.
British Columbia’s roads carve and wind through some of world’s most spectacular scenery. We who live here can take for granted how unforgettable this province is, but folks come from around the world to experience our province.
Over a decade ago, I opted into a walking lifestyle in Victoria. Living on Vancouver Island’s rugged coastline leaves me marveling daily on BC’s beauty. But just across the water are the towering Cascade and Olympic Mountains, often making me long for the adventures on the mainland, where I was born.
So, when Miss604 asked if I wanted to explore BC with a Honda Passport, I didn’t even fake being demure. Hell yeah!
Sometimes, visiting family is the all the reason you need for a road trip, so I hatched a plan to visit my Okanagan aunt, since the Okanagan is a wonderful place to just be for a few days.
Leaving the Island for a roadtrip is complicated, and costly. But my friends at Helijet provided me with an 11:30 flight, which lands next to Waterfront Station. By 1:00pm, I’d picked up the Passport and was enroute to the Trans-Canada.
I kept it simple to get there, taking the Coquihalla as a much quicker drive. But if I’d been able to leave at dawn, I’d have taken the old Highway 1 up through Spuzzum and Lytton, the long way around — and an immeasurably beautiful trip.
Really, “the long way around” is the BC special. It’s what we do. With a province this big, all the ways are long. In fact, it’s hard to convey to outsiders how immense British Columbia is — or convey to BC folks how small other places are!
In Europe once, I had breakfast in Croatia, coffee in Slovenia, and lunch in Italy — on the same day. I drove three hours. Total.
As someone who grew up in the Fraser Valley, what a chuckle! It took longer to drive through Manning Park last week than it did to hit two of those three international borders in Europe.
How big is BC?
Well, it’s 23 hours to drive from the south end of BC to the north end, and 7 hours to drive from the coast to Alberta’s border. That’s without bathroom breaks, meals, rests, stand-and-gapes, or hiccups along the way. Then there’s Vancouver Island, all the archipelagos, and nations like Haida Gwaii. Vancouver Island alone is three hours east-west and six hours from the capital up to Shushartie on the far end.
So much of British Columbia can never, ever be seen by anyone without a car, and road trips are a must if you’re to appreciate this land.
My upbringing? All road-tripping, thanks to parents from tiny, wee Prince Edward Island — 0.5% of BC’s size* — who were forever agog at the vastness and immensity of this province. Our family vacation always involved loading the car and plotting a route.
As an adult, my love of music and photography goes hand-in-hand with taking the roads no one else does, so road tripping has always been my favourite way to experience anywhere, especially BC.
Back in the day, I’d zip around the province in crappy-but-reliable hatchbacks, windows down, bugs pinging painfully off bare arms, stereo crackling at full blast. It was everything I ever wanted it to be.
Quite a switch, then, to be in the Honda Passport last week, where I drove as much as eight hours in a day with zero back pain and chilling nicely with A/C and ventilated seats on my 35-degree drive, for zero bug-pinging.
It was also my first adventure with Honda’s “Driver Assist,” which was quite the helper on those sometimes-harrowing mountain roads. But I’m one of those weirdos who actively loves driving, so I enjoyed my hands engaged and my mind on the road. If I had kids in the back seat, I’d be driver-assisting all day long on those twisty, steep roads.
And folks should be road-tripping with kids. It’s as much about teaching them about this world’s beauty as it is about getting where you’re going.
Every kid should see a starry night with a truly dark sky. Every kid should feel tiny in this big world at least once, whether it’s standing at Manning Park’s Cascade Lookout or running through seafoam in Tofino as waves thunder their way ashore.
If you’re looking to reckon with your place in the universe, a whole world of BC roads can take you someplace appropriate for doing so.
Whether it’s via the Crowsnest or the Yellowhead or the Malahat, road-tripping BC is all about feeling small in a big, beautiful world, year-round.
Along your route will be fleeting experiences that’ll be burned in your memory until the end of time — like rounding a bend to see a town like Okanagan Falls for the first time, or smelling a rainforest or salt air through a crack in the window on a hot day, or arriving at your destination after a 25-kilometre descent from sky-high mountains.
Honestly, it’s almost unfair how spectacular British Columbia is. This summer, it’s time for you to find a BC road less travelled.
*944,735 square kilometres versus 5,660 square kilometres!
