Writer Jay Fleming is on the road in a CanaDream vehicle. He adapted readily to living and working as a nomad. (Teresa Tam photo)
More and more companies in Canada are providing increased flexibility for their employees following the COVID-19 pandemic, and that has led to exciting new travel possibilities.
What if you could work and travel at the same time?
What if you could blend vacation time with work time?
Taking a decidedly glass-half-full approach, we decided to turn pandemic realities to our advantage, and combine work and travel — doing it all in a CanaDream RV.
One of the joys of RVing in Canada is being able to get out and enjoy tourist highlights like a boat trip on Maligne Lake in Alberta’s Jasper Provincial Park. (Teresa Tam photo)
We dreamt up our plan, and set a course for the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. After picking up our RV from the friendly (and incredibly knowledgeable) folks at CanaDream in Calgary, we began to work our itinerary around meetings in our Outlook calendars. Both of us negotiated half-days with our employers for most of the journey and that flexibility was a key for our trip to succeed. We had the freedom to drive to new locations, park our mobile office for the days and nights that we weren’t working, and enjoy life on the road. In theory, this was a great plan!
The biggest hurdle to making the whole thing a reality: technology. As we both work in marketing, Zoom calls are not just a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence — they’re the lifeblood of our profession. We knew we’d need consistent access to high-speed Internet, and lots of power for our various devices. Enter the Wireless Hub, a device you can connect to a SIM card and utilize with data purchased specifically for it, thus eliminating the danger of going over on your wireless plan by tethering to your phone. With this slick machine connected and all of our devices plugged into the ample A/C outlets in the RV (which charge via the 30V connections on-site, the solar panels on the roof, or the generator on-board), we could both be on calls simultaneously. Noise interference is a bit of a trick, so we found it worked best to have one person sitting outside in the fresh air, and the other inside. The best part, we would no longer need a cheesy Zoom background — not with the towering Rockies behind us, always wowing the other meeting attendees.
The Canadian Rockies are a road-tripper’s dream, and they’re all the more alluring when they can be your home base for weeks or months at a time. (Teresa Tam photo)
Our rental RV was the Super Van Camper model, which is surprisingly spacious for two people, especially when the mechanically powered sides are extended. The full kitchen and its dining table made for an excellent office set-up during the day, and could convert back into the dining space in the evening. And when we were parked at our campgrounds in both Banff and Jasper, we found the most comfortable seat for work calls was in the CanaDream-provided camper chair, set up outside in the nature surrounding us.
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It was, in a word, seamless. Since both of our companies were in Toronto, we feared the two-hour time change might make life difficult, but in fact it turned out to be a massive advantage for us. We could work during the Eastern time zone schedule, and then drive to a new location in the RV with plenty of daylight to spare. Our meetings ended at 3 p.m. Mountain time, leaving us hours to find new spots to catch the sunset behind the Rockies each evening. Our favourite was at Pyramid Lake in Jasper National Park, where the view is spectacular.
You may be wondering, with this hybrid style of vacation, “Were we really able to feel the benefits of ‘unplugging’?” The answer is yes … mostly. One of those moments was accidentally dictated by a lack of signal coverage during our day trip to Maligne Lake. As we made our way down Highway 93 and then Maligne Lake Road from Jasper, we noticed our phones losing service, bar by bar.
Writer Jay Fleming keeps his focus while working in a CanaDream RV, which has a number of comforts for making the digital-nomad lifestyle possible. (Teresa Tam photo)
Once we reached the lake, that signal was non-existent, on phones and wireless hub. Luckily for us, we had meeting-free days, and could go completely off-grid. And, boy, we were glad that we did. The boat tour of the lake was one of the highlights of our trip, immersing us in the breathtaking Queen Elizabeth range and some of the Rockies most majestic peaks, all from the unique perspective of a boat on the lake.
For us, the endless months of the pandemic and the constraints of WFH gave us the opportunity to flip our day-to-day lives around and embrace a new possibility — a hybrid and productive working vacation, unlocked by our favourite new acronym: WFRV.
MORE ABOUT VISITING JASPER
The Maligne Lake Cruise is a must. With a special stop on Spirit Island, a spiritual place for the Stoney Nakoda First Nation, who believe mountains are physical representations of their ancestors. Easily accessible by RV, with a massive parking lot full of RV-sized spaces.
Note: Jay Fleming is writing a series of articles about his RV experience in Canada. Check his first two installments, “Becoming RV People in the Canadian Rockies” and “Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone“.
