For my 8th birthday, I got a travel book with stickers to glue onto pages containing stories about exotic locations from Australia to Zanzibar, iconic sites like the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall and the Acropolis and magnificent geographical features like Mount Everest, Victoria Falls and the Great Barrier Reef. These things might as well have been on another planet since, at that time, no one we knew had done that kind of travel. And, as far as I could tell, no one even aspired to it because this kind of travel was clearly beyond the reach of the average person.
Several decades later, I have been very fortunate to have been to many of the places in that book (or at least the ones I remember).
I have travelled to all 13 provinces and territories, half of the US states and 50 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Some of those countries like Yugoslavia no longer exist and others like Iran and Afghanistan were unfortunately, safe destinations for only a brief time.
My experience with Great Canadian Travel started shortly after it opened in 1980 and my good friend Arnie Hydamaka started working there.
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