- In SoCal you can go from the ocean and beaches over the San Gabriel mountains to the desert in a couple of hours.
- Or you can go from the high plains outside Denver, cross the Rockies and the Colorado Plateau and end up in the alien landscape of Moab, UT with all those canyons and arches in 5.5 hours.
- You can start at the Grand Canyon in AZ and go down through the ski resort of Flagstaff, the red rocks of Sedona to the low lying desert of Phoenix in 4.5 hours.
From this perspective, ON can’t offer that. But my take is that ON’s geography is underrated because in general, people don’t have a rating for it. They are unaware of what there really is. Therefore, it is underrated.
In the GTA, if you mention Scarboro Bluffs to a bunch of west enders, they will look at you blankly. If you mention the Niagara Escarpment to east enders and even west enders, they will look at you blankly.
I have covered virtually every point of interest within a two hour drive and much of what there is to see within a five hour drive. I would then post pics on Facebook and people would ask “where is that?”. And this is from people who live half hour away from some of these spots. It got to the point where I would purposely mislabel the title of the album to suggest I visited another state or province and no one was any wiser. Well maybe like one person would figure it out and leave a comment exposing my deceit.
I took some pics of the Badlands in Caledon and labelled it Arizona and people were like “dude, when the hell did you go to Arizona?” And this is people in Brampton. I grew up in Brampton, 20 minutes away from this spot. When I posted a Tobermory album, I used some vague title and people were asking if it was New Brunswick or out west. I posted a few pics of a couple of the more interesting Hamilton waterfalls like Devil’s Punchbowl and Spencer’s Gorge and someone guessed I was in New Zealand.
When I made that “Rally of Hamilton” video, which I also posted somewhere on this forum, a couple of people were confused by the title because the video mostly consisted of up, down, left and right driving through twisty roads both in the country and right in the heart of the city. When TO people think Hamilton, they think refineries and smoke stacks. Basically what they see when they drive over the Skyway. Well not all people, but you get the point.
Then there’s the wilderness of up north. Now, everyone knows it’s nice, but for most people who don’t live, camp or cottage up there, they don’t really know just how unique the landscape is. Something I find very unique, that you will only find in very few places, is the Trent Severn Waterway. You can travel from Trenton out to Georgian Bay via rivers, lakes, canals and locks. From GB you can then travel a couple of great lakes and take the Illinois River to the Mississippi down to the Gulf and through FLA and up along the Intercoastal to NYC and up the Hudson and through to Montreal and back to Trenton. This is known as the Great Loop. I believe you can also go from Ottawa to Trenton through the Rideau and whatever else there is. Not too familiar with that route.
Map: Steven Fick/Canadian Geographic
https://www.discovermuskoka.ca/thing.../boat-cruises/