Pacific to the Rockies

Fourteen nights by hire car through interior British Columbia, and the itinerary is built around three stops rather than a long chain, which keeps the driving honest.

Kamloops opens it, a city at the junction of two rivers with a heritage main street on Victoria Street and a riverside park. The BC Wildlife Park there is a rehabilitation centre as much as a zoo, holding grizzly bears, arctic wolves and other species native to western Canada that cannot be returned to the wild.

The Trans-Canada Highway then follows Shuswap Lake, which has sandy beaches and a houseboat culture of its own, to Revelstoke, with views from Mount Revelstoke National Park over the Columbia Valley and optional whitewater rafting on the Illecillewaet.

The Columbia Mountains come next, with the Giant Cedars Boardwalk through old-growth western red cedar and Canyon Hot Springs, and then Golden. The Golden Skybridge is the headline: two suspension bridges, the higher of them 130 metres above a canyon floor, which are the highest in Canada and look out at both the Rocky and Purcell ranges. Canadian Affair include the flights, the hire car, the hotels and the named attractions, with fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. This route deliberately avoids Banff and Lake Louise, which for a second visit to the region is an advantage rather than an omission, and the interior is a good deal quieter than the parks in July and August. The hot springs along the way are also the unsung pleasure of interior British Columbia, and there are a great many more of them than the famous ones at Banff.