Canada

Ten provinces, three territories

Canada's map is deceptively simple: thirteen regions, most of them enormous. Visiting all of them means covering a country wider than the continental United States, and the territories alone — Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut — are bigger than most countries in Europe. Very few Canadians have been to all thirteen, which makes it a genuinely rare accomplishment.

Most travelers fill in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia first, then Alberta on a Banff trip. The Maritimes tend to come as a cluster — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island are a comfortable week by car, and the Confederation Bridge makes PEI an easy add. Newfoundland is the province people underestimate: it's a separate flight or a long ferry from Nova Scotia, and once you're there the island takes days to see properly.

The hard three

The territories are where this map gets interesting. Whitehorse in the Yukon has regular flights from Vancouver and is the most accessible of the three, with the Alaska Highway bringing road-trippers through every summer. Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories is a popular aurora destination and also reachable by road. Nunavut is the real prize — there are no roads in from the south at all, so Iqaluit means a flight from Ottawa or Montreal, and it's the one most finishers save for last.

Click a province to mark it visited, again for want-to-go. If you're also collecting provincial highpoints, national parks, or capitals, those maps live alongside this one and share your progress.

Crossing the country by rail and road

The Trans-Canada Highway runs 7,800 kilometers from Victoria to St. John's and touches every province — it's the single most efficient way to fill in the southern ten, and plenty of people do it in a summer. VIA Rail's Canadian covers Vancouver to Toronto in four days through the Rockies and the prairies, collecting British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario from a dome car. The Ocean continues from Montreal to Halifax for Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. What the rails can't do is the north; for that, it's the Dempster Highway to the Arctic coast, the Alaska Highway through the Yukon, or a flight.