There are trips you take to see things. And there are trips you take to understand something — about yourself, about what you want, about what's left when you remove the calendar, the responsibilities and the habits of thirty years. The Camino de Santiago belongs to the second category. It's not a tourist trip. It's not a sports hike, even if the blisters and the knee pain are very real. It's a walking journey of several weeks across Spain, alone or with strangers who become something else as the stages go by, toward a cathedral in the northwestern corner of the European continent — and what happens during this trip isn't what you'd planned.

It's the question our AquaTerra advisors hear most often since 2018: "Will there be sargassum when we get there?" The honest answer is: it depends — on the destination, the month, the weather and a bit of luck. But that's not a satisfying answer when you've paid 3,000 or 5,000 CAD for a week in the sun. This guide gives you everything you have a right to know before you book.

There are trips you plan to see monuments. And there are trips you plan to understand something — a culture, a way of doing things, a relationship to time and to the land that no museum visit can really convey. Scotland's distillery trail belongs to the second category. It's not a tourist trip. It's a trip for the curious — to understand how water, barley, peat and time inside an oak cask produce liquids that people all over the world open in the evening knowing they're drinking something irreplaceable.

There are places on this planet that our children may never see—not because they will no longer exist on the map, but because what made them extraordinary will be gone. The Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand has retreated 3 kilometers since 1900. The Great Barrier Reef has lost more than 50% of its coral since 1995. The Maldives are sinking by about 3 millimeters a year in a rising ocean.

There are travel experiences that have no equivalent in ordinary life. Not monuments or museums — monuments can be photographed, read about, imagined. No, the experiences that have no equivalent are those that engage all the senses at once in a direction you didn’t expect. European Christmas markets are among them.