California remains the top choice for Canadians travelling to the U.S., Visit California officials say. “We’re the number one travel destination in the U.S.,” Andrew Levine of Development Counsellors International, a media relations firm that represents the state, said at a Visit California event in Toronto on Monday, April 4. A January 2022 study found that the likelihood of Canadians visiting the Golden State was up 46.6%. “The engine of travel is restarting,” Levine said. Air Canada and WestJet fly from Canadian cities to California, as does Swoop and Flair. Canada Jetlines is expected to arrive soon, as is Air Read more
wine
I’ve been lucky enough to visit Australia three times. I had a month there in 2000 for the Sydney Olympics, then went back in 2010 for the Toronto Star and then to an Australia Tourism Exchange meeting in Brisbane. I haven’t been everywhere, not by a long shot. But I’ve been visited Sydney, Melbourne, Uluru (formerly Ayer’s Rock), Brisbane/Gold Coast, The Great Barrier Reef, Fraser Island, King’s Canyon, and remote Lord Howe Island. Here’s a mix of some of my photos along with others from Unsplash, to help cover off places I haven’t yet visited.
RICE LAKE AND ENVIRONS, ONTARIO – A deep-in-the-woods garden with hundreds of Zimbabwean stone sculptures. A new winery run by a young couple who refused to let naysayers ruin their dream. Maybe the best butter tarts in the country. And a great family resort on a beautiful stretch of water. I live in Toronto and have been writing travel stories full-time for 11 years, but I’d somehow never made it to the area around Rice Lake until a recent, late-summer weekend. What I found was a surprisingly diverse array of attractions run by wonderful, passionate people with the kind of Read more
This is encouraging. The Canadian government today issued a new tourism strategy that talks about new ways of getting more tourists out of the big cities and into other great areas of this wonderful country of ours. They also want to boost numbers in slower seasons, when hotels, attractions and restaurants could surely use the boost. I want to see how the funding develops, but the mere fact a federal Cabinet minister is actually talking about new funding for tourism is great news, as that’s seldom been the case in this country in my experience. Canada’s tourism numbers grew 1.2% Read more
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA – I get to travel to some pretty amazing places in the world, and I check out a lot of great hotels. But I try not to research things too much for fear of raising my expectations and spoiling a nice surprise. That was definitely the case for my brief stay at the Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain Resort in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. I was in town for a travel writers’ conference and didn’t arrive until late in the day. But I was immediately taken with the wonderful lobby entrance and the look and feel of the place, which Read more
