Charles Gordon is a journalist and author with no desire to cross the country by canoe, ultralight, or via the Northwest Passage. He just wants to get in his car with his wife and spend a summer, like the gentlemen travellers of another era, seeing what our land is like. He wants to visit places he had read about and see friends he hasn’t met in years. And in The Canada Trip, he describes doing exactly this.

Taking a leave of absence from his job at The Ottawa Citizen, Gordon meanders first through Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. Returning by a different route, he continues west across the southern prairies, into British Columbia, up the West Coast, and back to Ottawa by the northern route. He travels 24,863 kilometres in three months, staying in motels, with friends, and, occasionally, in $200-per-night hotel rooms.

Through it all he collects town mottos, nominates views for his top-10 list, and gets lost in nearly every small town he comes across. The most dramatic thing that happens to him is being overtaken in B.C. by speeding Alberta drivers, and the only tension is whether he will catch a ferry. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Gordon’s account of his travels is very enjoyable.

The Canada Trip has a homey flavour. It is lightly written, with a touch of humour and self-effacing irony, although occasionally the niceness of the telling grates a little. There is also a bit too much about long-lost friends who are important only because the author used to work with them.

As in most road-trip stories, no subject is covered in very much depth and everyone who reads the parts of this book about places they know will realize how much is left out. The section on southern Alberta and the Drumheller badlands, for example, never mentions dinosaurs or the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology. However, we learn other interesting facts on both a large and a small scale. I now know why the government of Newfoundland sits to the left of the speaker, and that the house wine in a Fraser Lake, B.C. restaurant doesn’t really have a name, comes in a big white box, and is liked by everybody.

The charm of The Canada Trip is that it is a well-told, personal story of an expedition any of us could make. It leaves the reader wanting to get out to see some of the country, making it a very effective travel book indeed.