We've traveled quite a bit. One of our favorite trips was a cruise around New Zealand in early 2020 - just before COVID-19 hit with force. Check out my website for that trip.
Japan.
There are two places that I enjoyed a lot (as a tourist).
New York (spent 1 week and a half) and Japan (2weeks and a bit'ish more).
A clean, well organized place, sometimes weird. Lots of stuff to see. Good for nerds and tech. Ridding those high speed trains that will take you everywhere. Good and affordable food.
I need to go back there some day.
Kaanapali, Maui.
I'm more of a fan of the Alberta backwoods. I've driven through so many places across this great province I call home I can't list them all. The only thing we don't have here is tidewater. We do have some humongous and DEEP lakes though, if fishing is your thing. One of my favorites is a mid-July rip along the Icefields parkway on my Blackbird I took a few years ago. I woke up before the crack of dawn one morning, fuelled up the Bird, grabbed a bottle of Coca Cola, and pointed the front wheel at Hinton, where I stopped for breakfast and a fuel-up for the 'Bird. Potty and gas break in Jasper, and then hit the Parkway. Managed to scare the bejeebus out of a few busloads of foreign tourists as I went screaming past them at Mach Chicken on my back wheel, and then stopped to snap this photo. Topped off in Banff, linked up with a couple of buddies in Calgary for a cruise down the party strip (Can't remember if it's Electric Avenue or The Red Mile.) Filled the beast up one last time and pointed north towards home. Quick stop in Red Deer to squeegee the bugs off my helmet visor so I could see the road, and got back to Edmonton with just enough time to grab my g/f at the time's helmet, gloves and jacket so I could pick her up from her bar night with her friends. Average speed was about 100 km/h, but in the less fun parts, I was easily way more than double that. Fun fact about the Blackbird, it got peak fuel effiency at around 170-180 km/h. Fast enough to land me in jail had I been stopped.
![Bird1[1].JPG](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/97708i4CED519C6402C7B9/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Bird1[1].JPG")
Another memorable trip for me was a week long 4x4 trip I did in the late 1990s with a few buddies in my old 1983 S-15 Jimmy. We were down in southern Alberta, around Racehorse and Dutch Creeks. That trip I broke a lot of parts (and a couple of spares) and had some of the weirdest weather for August. We were traversing a series of valleys, and it was hot & sunny in one, pouring rain in the second, SNOWING in the third, and once we got to the fourth, hot & sunny again. One of my buddies rolled his Toyota 4Runner down the side of a mountain, and it kept running. My other buddy darn near got into a fist fight with a Grizzly bear over the 7 pound rainbow trout he had fought for an hour before the bear showed up. I wish I knew where the photos were. Those were all on 35mm film, and I never did scan them. Digital cameras were a thing only the super rich and pros had, and even back then they weren't nearly as good as what you'd find on a smartphone today.
Even spending 2 weeks traveling through France as a 17 year old kid doesn't hold in my memories as well as some of my home-grown adventures.
