This weekend I met a Welsh couple, in Cape Breton (first time in Canada) to visit their cousins (my friends) who moved here as young children. My friends just happen to live in a ten acre rural paradise - rolling fields, the Highlands as their main view, river one side the property, huge vegetable garden, happy dogs and cats, swarms of friends in and out, so the visitors may have gotten an exaggerated idea of Canadian lifestyles.

But, like other UK folks I've talked with, it is the distances, the size of Canada, that astounds them. That my husband and I would drive 400+ km to visit friends for a couple days, that many of us commute 50 or 60 km. to work, that a lake might have only three or four homes on it, or none at all, that the Laurentian Shield is mostly uninhabited and could swallow Europe, are all facts hard for them to grasp. Canada is durn near empty, by UK standards.

Oh, and they were very nice clever fun people!