Victoria–Nanaimo: Trans-Canada Highway

Behind you, a ferry the size of a city block is loading cars for Horseshoe Bay, across the strait in West Vancouver. Last year more than a million and a half people made that crossing from this one terminal — Departure Bay, one of Nanaimo's two vehicle links to the mainland, a conveyor belt of windshields and coffee cups running all day, every day. Hold that image, because the first crossing that mattered on this water was a canoe. In 1850, a Snuneymuxw chief the Hudson's Bay men came to call the Coal Tyee — Che-wich-i-kan — loaded coal from this harbour and paddled it down the coast to Victoria. Everything you're about to drive follows from that trip. The mines, the railway, the towns, the money, the capital where the money got spent — all of it downstream of one man with a paddle and something worth showing. So here's what the next couple of hours look like: a working harbour city with a wooden fort still standing in it, mill towns that lost their mills and found something else, farm valleys, a mountain road with saltwater dropping away beside it, and at the end, a stone marking where the road runs out at the edge of the continent. It's a spectacular drive, and it makes a kind of sense you can only get by doing the whole thing in order. Straight on, and let's go.