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Kevin Wagar | Wandering Wagars

@wanderingwagars

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Written from the car. Somewhere between Bosnia and Montenegro, our driver Dino from @tourmage is navigating mountain roads while I try to make sense of the last few days. 🇧🇦

This is part of a ten-day anniversary trip through the Balkans for Christina and me, no kids, and Bosnia-Herzegovina has quietly become the heart of it.

We wandered the old town in Trebinje. Stood in the spray at Kravica Falls. Sat at the Dervish house in Blagaj, where the river pours straight out of a cliff. Walked among the medieval tombstones in Stolac, and climbed the tower at Počitelj for a view that made the stairs worth it.

Then Sarajevo.

To put it lightly, the 20th century was not kind to this city. It wears the scars of the Second World War and the siege of the 1990s openly, on its buildings and in the people who lived through it. We paid our respects at the Tunnel of Hope, and stopped for a moment at every Sarajevo Rose we passed, the mortar scars in the pavement filled with red resin to mark where people died.

But Sarajevo does not wallow. What we found was a city that is very much alive. Excited about its future. Living well, loudly, and generously.

Where else can you find a mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox church and a synagogue a few minutes’ walk from each other, sharing the same streets for centuries? We ate klepe, dolmas and goulash until we couldn’t move, hiked into the mountains that hosted the 1984 Olympics, and drank from the cold, clear fountains that locals swear you’ll return for.

We spent our last night in Mostar, which might be the prettiest medieval town centre I’ve ever seen. The Old Bridge was built in the 1500s, destroyed during the war, and rebuilt stone by stone. Watching it light up at night felt like the whole country in one view.

Nineteen years married on Tuesday, and still finding places that leave us quiet in the back seat of a car.

📌 Save this for your Balkans trip
💬 We’re heading into Montenegro now. What should we not miss? 👇

📍 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

#BosniaAndHerzegovina #Sarajevo #Mostar #BalkansTravel taken in Bosnia and Herzegovina by @wanderingwagars

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2 days ago

When you get that first glimpse of Old Dubrovnik.

Christina and I are on a road trip though the Balkans for the next 10 days.

We’re starting right here in Dubrovnik, Croatia and we’re already learning just how badly we have been pronouncing words from this region. taken in Dubrovnik, Croatia by @wanderingwagars

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5 days ago

I spent the weekend in Gananoque with my good friend Chris from @rudderless_trvl, and what a way to kick off the fall season.

We started on the trails of Thousand Islands National Park, granite and oak underfoot and the St. Lawrence flashing between the trees.

Then we dove into Gananoque's art scene. This scene is booming in a way that I never expected. We took in Come From Away at the @thousandislandsplayhouse, which was such a great show that somehow connected a heartbreaking moment many of us remember to the wholesome sweetness of small-town Canadian friendliness. We met Dennis, the curator at O'Connor's Gallery downtown, and spent the rest of the weekend spotting gorgeous local art tucked into corners all over town.

You all know food and drink are my favorite part of any destination, and Gananoque held its own. Riva and Graydon's at Woodview Inn were both standout dinners, and local hotspots like Pistachio's, Laverne's, and Frisk brought more creativity and flavor than towns twice this size. We also slipped over to Mallorytown for cider at BUSL and a few brews at ArBru, a brewery that runs entirely on solar power.

And you can't come to the 1000 Islands without seeing the islands themselves. We hopped on a City Cruises tour past Boldt Castle, with the shoreline turning red and gold all around us.

Gananoque is beautiful, it's creative, and it has got an unbelievable food scene. If you're looking for a fall weekend getaway in Ontario, this is a very good place to start.

📌 Save this for your fall road trip
💬 What's your favorite small town for a fall weekend? Tell me where I should go next 👇

📍 Gananoque, Ontario with @travel1000islands

#1000Islands #Gananoque #FallInOntario #OntarioTravel taken in Gananoque by @wanderingwagars

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12 days ago

Three days, a car you’ll barely use, and a downtown small enough that your kids can walk most of it before lunch. That’s a long weekend in Halifax. 🌊

Day 1: Stay on the water. Walk the boardwalk with no plan and see what tied up overnight. We found a tall ship and got invited aboard. Spend the afternoon at the Maritime Museum, then ride the ferry to Dartmouth and back at golden hour. It costs a bus fare and it’s the best harbour cruise in the city.

Day 2: Head uphill. Be inside the Citadel when the noon gun fires. Slow down in the Public Gardens with an ice cream. Catch the view from the Central Library’s rooftop. Then donairs. Bring more napkins than you think.

Day 3: Out on the harbour. Georges Island if the ferry’s running, with tunnels under the fort and red chairs looking back at the skyline. If it isn’t, Pier 21 or the Discovery Centre, then an afternoon on the trails at Point Pleasant Park, past gun batteries half swallowed by the forest.

Stretch it to five days and you can add Peggy’s Cove and the Eastern Shore. But three is plenty to fall for it.

If you’re planning a family long weekend in Nova Scotia, this is the city I’d point you to.

📌 Save this for your next long weekend
💬 Comment HALIFAX and I’ll send you the full guide, itineraries included

What’s the one thing you’d add to a Halifax long weekend? 👇

📍 Halifax, Nova Scotia

#Halifax #NovaScotia #FamilyTravel #VisitHalifax taken in Halifax, Nova Scotia by @wanderingwagars

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17 days ago

You won't like visiting Halifax with kids. I've prepared a list of complaints. 🌊

First, it's been called "the Vancouver of the East," which is the only genuinely disappointing thing about it, because it isn't remotely accurate. I've been to both cities this year. Halifax doesn't need the comparison.

The waterfront is impossible to walk in a straight line because there's always a tall ship, a naval vessel, or a giant wave sculpture your kids have to climb. The museums will make you late for lunch. The harbor ferry has been running since 1752 and costs less than a coffee, which frankly feels irresponsible. Pier 21 will have you looking up your own family in immigration records, like I did with my Nana. And the local donair sauce is made from condensed milk, which is simply not how food is supposed to work.

It also rained for two days straight on our last trip. That gave us a tall ship tour, three hours in a museum, and a fishing village full of artists we'd never have met in sunshine.

So, fine. You'll love it. Just give it more than two days.

If you're planning a Nova Scotia road trip or looking for things to do in Halifax with kids, save this one.

📌 Save for your trip planning
💬 Comment HALIFAX and I'll send you the full family guide

Haligonians, settle something for me: who makes the best donair in the city? 👇

📍 Halifax, Nova Scotia

#Halifax #NovaScotia #FamilyTravel #VisitHalifax by @wanderingwagars

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19 days ago

This is Dylan on the Wolastoq in Fredericton, somewhere between a paddle he didn’t want to end and a sturgeon he wasn’t expecting to catch.

Bald eagles overhead. A city skyline on one bank and nothing but forest on the other. And a twelve-year-old who, for once, wasn’t asking for more WiFi..

Sometimes the best trips are the ones where nothing much happens and it’s still all you talk about on the drive home.

If you’re looking for easy family paddling in New Brunswick, this watershed now has 23 mapped routes, most of them an afternoon or less.

📌 Save this for your next slow day
💬 Comment PADDLE and I’ll send you the full guide

Where’s your “no stress, just this” place? 👇

📍 Fredericton, New Brunswick

#Paddling #NewBrunswick #SlowTravel #ExploreNB taken in Fredericton, New Brunswick by @wanderingwagars

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21 days ago

Fredericton has quietly become one of the best places to paddle in Canada, and it happened because somebody got tired of sending visitors to Uncle John’s backyard. 🛶

For years, the rivers and marshes around New Brunswick’s capital were a local secret. Not because anyone was hiding them. Nobody had ever written the launch points down. Locals knew every bend. Visitors had no idea where to start.

So this summer the region mapped it. Twenty-three routes across the Wolastoq watershed, from easy one-hour evening paddles to full-day river runs, with launches, take-outs and difficulty ratings all marked out.

My son and I spent a morning on the main river with the man who made it happen. Forest on one bank, the city skyline on the other, and more wildlife than we could keep count of. Then we went looking for a marsh so full of turtles the locals named it after them. That one did not go entirely to plan.

The routes may be newly mapped, but the water isn’t. The Wolastoqiyik have paddled it for ten thousand years, and the oldest surviving birchbark canoe in the world sits in a gallery a few blocks from the river.

If you’re planning a New Brunswick road trip or looking for family paddling in Atlantic Canada, this is a city worth building a few days around.

📌 Save this for your trip planning
💬 Comment PADDLE and I’ll send you my full guide

📍 Fredericton, New Brunswick

#Paddling #NewBrunswick #ExploreNB #Kayaking taken in Fredericton, New Brunswick by @wanderingwagars

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25 days ago

Time moves differently in Fundy National Park. 🌊

The tide doesn't care what time want it to come. It comes in when it comes in, and goes out when it goes out, and if you want to walk on the seabed you check the tables and you wait. There's something relaxing about a place that kind of consistency.

So Dylan and I stopped trying to dictate the schedule and let the park do it for us.

Mornings out on the ocean floor, poking at tidal pools. Afternoons in a ravine so green and dripping it felt closer to rainforest than Maritime forest, the temperature falling fifteen degrees in the ten minutes it took to walk down to the water.

Whole hours went missing. I couldn't tell you where.

And then, in the evening evening, the light would start to go and I'd feel slightly cheated. Which is the strange thing about this place. Days that stretch out longer than they should, ending sooner than you're ready for.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I noticed my shoulders had come down from around my ears.

We do a lot of chasing on our family trips. Fundy National Park was about of not chasing anything, and I think it might be the best thing we did all year.

📌 Save this for when you need somewhere to slow down
💬 Where do you go when you need to breathe? 👇

📍 Fundy National Park, New Brunswick

#FundyNationalPark #NewBrunswick #SlowTravel #BayOfFundy taken in Fundy National Park, Parks Canada by @wanderingwagars

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a month ago

This will be under 40 feet of water by dinner. 🌊

But here's a fresh take: the tides are the least interesting thing about Fundy National Park.

I've kayaked through the flowerpots at Hopewell Rocks at high tide and stood on the Petitcodiac watching the tidal bore roll in. The Bay of Fundy is extraordinary, and I'll never get tired of it. It's also the only thing anyone ever tells you about this park, which is why most people give Fundy an afternoon and drive off convinced they've seen it.

What they drive past is 207 square kilometres of Acadian forest, river valley and coastline climbing into the Caledonia Highlands.

💦 More than 25 waterfalls and over 100km of trail. Most visitors see one
🌿 Dickson Falls drops you down a boardwalk into a mossy ravine that feels closer to rainforest than Maritime forest
🌡️ The Fundy Effect means the coast can be 15 degrees colder than your campsite ten minutes inland. You'll leave sweating and arrive wanting a jacket
🕳️ Herring Cove holds the whole park in one stop: red cliffs, pebble beach, sea caves, a waterfall at the trailhead
✨ It's a Dark Sky Preserve, so the Milky Way shows up to the naked eye
🏊 And there's a heated saltwater pool, because the bay sits around 10°C in August

If you're planning a New Brunswick road trip, it's 90 minutes from Moncton and 90 minutes from Saint John. Moncton makes a strong base with Hopewell Rocks and the Acadian Coast in the same radius, and the coastal route in past Cape Enrage is worth the extra hour.

Give it an afternoon, and you get a covered bridge photo. Give it three days, and you get the park.

📌 Save this for your trip planning
💬 Comment FUNDY, and I'll send you the complete family guide.

📍 Fundy National Park, New Brunswick

#FundyNationalPark #BayOfFundy #NewBrunswick #ExploreNB taken in Fundy National Park by @wanderingwagars

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a month ago

Thirteen years old today. 🎂

Thirteen years of this kid, who in the last twelve months has stood at the DMZ looking into North Korea, eaten his way through Kuala Lumpur with a level of commitment I can only describe as superhuman, threatened to wrestle a Komodo dragon in Indonesia, and learned to surf the North Atlantic in about thirty minutes while I spent two hours getting rag-dolled beside him.

For the record, the Komodo dragon was unharmed.

Somewhere in the last year he stopped being the kid I bring along on trips and became the guy I'm trying to keep up with. It wasn’t a one day switch. I just looked up on a hiking trail this summer and he was already at the top, waiting, which was somehow worse.

Happy birthday, bud. Thanks for waiting at the top for me.

💬 Parents, what age did your kid start beating you at things? I need to know how long this goes on for 👇

#HappyBirthday #FatherAndSon #FamilyTravel #AdventureFamily taken in Brampton, Ontario by @wanderingwagars

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a month ago

Dylan turns 13 tomorrow, and the only thing he’s asked for is a mountain bike. 🚵

He’s been looking for his thing for a while. We’ve tried a lot of them. Nothing quite took.

Then we spent a couple of weeks riding trails across New Brunswick, and somewhere in there it clicked. I’d watch him disappear ahead of me on a flow trail, whooping the whole way down, and know I wasn’t going to catch him. On the drives between trailheads he talked about lines and jumps and what he’d try next time. He was still talking about it when we got home.

That’s the part I didn’t expect from this trip.

We travel for a lot of reasons. Adventure, culture, the education you can’t get from a classroom. But every so often a place hands your kid something they carry back with them, and it stops being a trip and starts being a part of who they’re becoming.

He didn’t find a destination out there. He found a sport.

So there’s a bike in his future, and a lot of weekends where I’m going to be the one getting dropped.

Happy birthday, bud. 🎂

Have your kids ever picked up something on a trip that stuck with them long after you got home? I’d love to hear it 👇 taken in New Brunswick, Canada by @wanderingwagars

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a month ago

Is New Brunswick Canada's most underrated mountain biking province? I went in expecting decent forest trails. 🚵

Then my son braked so hard in front of me on a flow trail called Insanity Later that I nearly rode into the back of him. He'd stopped for a view: turquoise and emerald ponds below us that looked like the Rockies, sitting in the middle of a 400-year-old coal mine that fifty years of Acadian forest had swallowed whole.

My first thought was, why is nobody talking about this?

Here's what's actually in this province:

⛏️ Minto, 40km of fast, rootless flow built on reclaimed mining terrain. Whistler sees around 100,000 riders a year. Minto sees 4,000. We passed three people all day
🌋 Sugarloaf, Atlantic Canada's first lift-served bike park, designed by the same crew behind Whistler Bike Park, built on an extinct volcano
⛰️ Sentiers Madawaska, 1,589m of cumulative descent across 60km, starting two minutes from downtown Edmundston
🌲 Fundy National Park, one of the only national parks in Canada with a purpose-built bike network and a pump track under old-growth forest
🪨 Rockwood Park in Saint John, up to 56km of old-school rock and root inside one of the largest urban parks in North America

85% of New Brunswick is forest, the highest of any province, and you can drive across the whole thing in four hours. Coastal singletrack in the morning, lift-served downhill by afternoon.

Almost all of it is volunteer-built. Buy the trail pass. Join the club.

📌 Save this for your next riding trip
💬 Comment TRAILS and I'll send you the full guide to every region

Then tell me: what's the most underrated place you've ever ridden? 👇

📍 New Brunswick, Canada

#MountainBiking #NewBrunswick #MTBCanada #ExploreNB taken in New Brunswick by @wanderingwagars

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a month ago