A Day Trip To Canada

During my travels over the last six months, I have met Canadians with increasing frequency in random places like a Starbucks at a rest area on the Pennsylvania turn pike, a cafe in Reykjavik, and a cathedral stairwell in London (Hi Canadian travel friends!) and I pride myself in my ability to distinguish a Canadian accent from an American one.  When I was visiting family in Pennsylvania last June, a trip north of the border was too tempting to pass up!

The iconic Niagara Falls

An especially enjoyable part of the trip to Canada was seeing cashiers' reactions to the one and two dollar bills we pulled out at each stop. The Canadian mint stopped producing one and two dollar bills in 1996, so the reactions from anyone 25 or younger was, "Uhhhh what are those?" and those older said, "Now, I have not seen those in a long, long time!" Okay, you might be pondering, so why do you randomly have all this old Canadian money?  My dad does some coin dealing and had a surplus of this currency, prompting a Canadian shopping spree of everything maple-flavoured for "snacks in the car." Yes, we were those tourists...

Canadians, does this money look at all familiar!?

Instead of just staying in the tourist haven of the falls, we drove through vineyard country to the cute lakeside town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, a mere twenty minutes north. The town is home to both a Christmas shop and a British import store, so I was very happy!

Rocking the hand sanitizer bottle in front of an inauthentic inukshuk.

Even though this trip definitely had more of a "tourist" feel than my usual "traveller" trips, it was a wonderful one-day outing to Canada.