did you guys have any scares when it came to being low on gas or is there a decent amount of stations scattered across the rural areas of the provinces?
extremely true.You need to understand that this is a rural area for the most part, yes there are enough gas stations etc, but they close between 7-9 pm 24 hour gas is a big city thing.
This is rural Canada it is a slower pace of life, manners matter greatly.
You have to go on a few tours to figure out what works best for you. All the best laid plans could go up in smoke when you realize how much pavement pounding you're actually doing. You're not covering a small area. My advice, based on my experience, is to decide if you want to do a big driving loop or do you want to experience culture, sightseeing and activities. If you really want to see and do stuff pick a smaller concentrated area. Get to know it, bond with it, build memories. Doing a big driving route (not that there's anything wrong with that) will just turn into a big blur and as much as you're seeing from the road you're also aware and frustrated by all the neat attractions you're missing. Either way, when you get home, you'll chuckle how the theory of your trip doesn't match the reality.
Yeah, when you get back someone says "Did you see XXX. It's fabulous" and you didn't see it.
Number one reason I tell people contemplating a road trip to the west coast to not rush it. We did an ~11K trip in 4 weeks (plus the weekends on either end of that) and still had plenty of didn't see it situations. The timeline didn't allow as many stops as we would have liked given our goals for places we DID want to stop and spend time at. IE, visiting Drumheller AB would have taken a day off of our planned time in Banff. Going to Lake Louise would have cut a day out of Vancouver or Whistler. A day in Seattle cut time out of Yellowstone National Park. It was tradeoffs everywhere.
When I hear people talk about doing the same sort of trip in two weeks I genuinely tell them to pick something less enthusiastic and closer to home - they will not have many good memories in the end, but they'll sure remember those endless days covering crazy distances stuck in their cars. We had a great time all in all, but we would have had a great many more memories and seen a lot more had we had 6 or 7 weeks instead.
100% ....we started out looking like 600km per day for 24 days and realized it simply was not going to fly.
We cut back a long loop in N BC and it dropped to 450 with a few fudge days in case of RAIN ( we needed one ). And still at times it felt rushed.....I'm ****** missing Chief Joseph Parkway.....made a GPS error and ended way past on the slab before I realized it. Also missed the Badlands loop tho that was mostly because we wanted to get home ( dodging weather ) and was getting mixed reviews on it.
No matter where you head ....weather has a role and Cape Breton is notorious as is the Gaspe which I have yet to loop. You need to allow weather delays when riding tho I will usually ride through most.