How about a nice trip to explore Canada, eh?

If you live near Zephyrhills or any of the other areas that have large concentrations of Canadian winter residents, you are aware of the influence they have on us.

Halfway through any conversation with many Canadians, you start punctuating your sentences and phrases with "eh?" (or as it is sometimes spelled there, "aye?"). And it isn't long before you start to get the urge to spend colored money, display good manners and watch hockey.

It's even more fun if you go there.

I took the ViaRail train across Canada trip 12 years ago and, because my wife had not had the experience, decided to repeat it last month. It was as much fun as I remembered, maybe even more.

Everyone — train conductors, hotel clerks, police officers and total strangers — treat you like an honored guest It's sort of like Disney took over employee training and civility education, except that you don't have to drop a big wad of money just to stand on the street corner.

Unlike Amtrak, ViaRail runs its service as though it still has some interest in staying in business. Employees are polite. Service is efficient The food is great, and, once you get into the Rockies, the scenery is drop-dead gorgeous.

Toronto, as a Winnipeg native told me with a good-humored snort, is an American suburb, and, true enough, it is hard there not to imagine you are in any good-sized U.S. city.

A word here about using "American." Citizens of the United States of America sometimes forget that the Americas include South and Central America and that the North American continent is made up of Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Although I prefer when in other American countries to say I am from "the States" or "the U.S." and have sometimes been reminded of the geographical faux pas by others, it doesn't seem to bother Canadians much, probably because, like a large part of the rest of the world, they aren't angry at us about anything.

I have said before and will repeat that much of eastern Canada looks like Land O'Lakes. I don't intend that as a slur on Land O'Lakes, but, let's face it, flat, green and rural can run you out of the domed observation car after a while.

Someone once told me Winnipeg is Canadian prairie country and is the only place in the world where you can watch your dog run away — for three days.

This trip, however, was enlivened by the fact we went in the fall and got to see leaf and vegetation colors that Floridians sometimes long for.

We took a couple of days off in Jasper, rather than just taking the five-day trip straight through, and found sort of a mini-Aspen with much more reasonable prices and no celebrities. The place we stayed at even had a rooftop spa — a really interesting experience on a chilly fall Canadian Rockies night. On our second trip up there, I found an empty vodka bottle next to the tub, and I reasoned that the fact I have recently stopped drinking alcohol for medical reasons may have been why 10 minutes or so at a stretch was enough for me.

We wrapped up our trip in Vancouver, a city with a truly international flavor where, interestingly, they are experimenting with decriminalizing marijuana... or... so I've heard.

Nothing brings you back to Floridian reality faster than turning on a hotel-room television and seeing, as we did, the now-all-too-familiar sight of a radar-painted hurricane heading for the peninsula.

We barely got out of New Orleans in time to escape Katrina (I mean by minutes), and it looked for a while like flying into Tampa was going to be a problem.

We braced ourselves for spending a day or two in the Atlanta airport, a prospect I would rate right up there with having microderm abrasion done with a floor sander and no anesthesia, but, wonder of wonders, all of our flights were on time and • slipped us in right behind the storm.

And, yes, for the record, I am aware that disrupted travel plans rate very low on the list of tragedies and pain brought about by major storms. But did I mention that it was the Atlanta airport we could have been stranded in?

By the way, travel tip of the month. Parkandfly.com – you spend one night in a J Motel and get free parking for as long as 15 days and a shuttle to the airport. Worked great.

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