Few know as well as Andrew Evans that the road is full of surprises, even when one is encountering familiar things, like a gas station bathroom outside Thunder Bay.
Evans is National Geographic’s “digital nomad,” a 35-year-old who blogs and tweets his way around the world. This week, a less sophisticated form of communication — toilet stall graffiti — got him thinking.
Not really anywhere until you’ve been nowhere, read the scrawl, which Evans captured in a picture and tweeted.
“It immediately made me think of Canada,” Evans says in a phone interview from the shores of Lake Superior. “This is going to sound wrong, but Canada is a lot of nowhere; it’s a lot of being in the middle of nowhere.
“There are people who have been to London and Paris and Hong Kong and L.A.,” he adds. “But they really haven’t travelled because cities are becoming more and more similar, especially in this global age.”
“But if you’ve been to nowhere, if you’ve landed with a seaplane in the middle of nowhere in northern Canada, there’s a sense of awe and appreciation for the Earth. That’s how I felt when I went to Antarctica. For me it was really life-changing.”
Evans lives to get off the beaten path. And for a month he’s doing so in Ontario, writing daily blogs and a stream of tweets for National Geographic’s Traveler magazine, where he’s worked on contract for the past five years.
He’s already visited Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa, where he spent Canada Day. (So as not to spoil the “where’s Andrew?” game he regularly plays with his 7,460 followers on Twitter, the Star isn’t revealing the rest of his itinerary.)
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