I swore I wouldn’t do it, and yet on our relocation road trip across Canada, I found I couldn’t help myself. Within 20 minutes of getting in the truck I had already begun nagging the kids with, “hey kids, look at the mountains,” and “hey kids, look at the deer!”
Invariably, the girls would either look up for a split second and grunt something unintelligible – or they wouldn’t look up at all, seeing as how they couldn’t hear me over their headphone and devices. Side note: thank you Netflix for introducing the download feature right before a 5,000 km trip!
The only exception was when we passed an over-sized roadside attraction. A massive hilltop tee pee in Medicine Hat. A huge goose in Wawa (actually, three huge geese). The towering nickel in Sudbury. Loudly exclaiming, “A big plane on a stick! Look!” never failed to get their attention.
They’re bizarre and pointless, but the kids loved stumbling across these strange roadside attractions. They didn’t care if the item in question was really the world’s largest whatever, they got a kick out of it anyway.
When planning our road trip, I thought we’d seek out these attractions and take photos with as many as possible. There are a number of websites where you can see lists of these attractions plotted on Google maps. I carefully selected a number of them that would be fun to drive by and take photos with.
Once we hit the road, my husband nixed that idea pretty damn quick. No way was he going to drive even a single kilometre out of our way to see a large cement sausage when we had days and days of driving ahead of us. By day two he wasn’t stopping for anything but gas and potty breaks, blaming the trailer we were pulling for his reluctance to lose any time.
We did end up seeing a number of “Canada’s largest” type attractions from the road, and when they coincided with rest stops in small, off highway towns. It was fun to check them out, and a nice distraction from their tech for the kids.
We asked readers to share photos from their favourite roadside attractions – here’s what they loved:
Canada’s Largest – Mammoth
Canada’s Largest – Nutcracker
Canada’s Largest – Mammoth
Canada’s Largest – Enterprise
Canada’s Largest – Dairy Cow
