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My wife Silvia, an elementary school teacher who didn’t get a chance to get away with me this summer at all, wanted to do a quick, stay-in-Canada, good old-fashioned road trip.
And as someone who hates planning anything in advance, or ahead of time for that matter, I needed a new way to plan this out.
Enter the much-maligned but also pretty damn awesome artificial-intelligence chat bot, AI agent, or whatever the proper name is now.
I chose one of the leading chat bots of the day and asked it to create a four-day travel itinerary that would efficiently take us from Barrie to the Eastern Townships outside Montreal and back again.
I also asked it to gear the trip toward art, history and nature.
One minute later I had in my hand a four-page document outlining the most efficient road-trip plan, with fascinating stops with complete time and mileage breakdowns.
As an added bonus, the chat bot also threw in accommodation suggestions to boot.
Nice work, but how accurate is it?
But since this plan was executed the night before we left, we decided to just throw caution to the wind and hit the road as our travel-planning overlord insisted.
I must say, it was a well-executed itinerary.
The accommodations were spot on, the amount of driving was split up between the days quite nicely and the sightseeing stops were, for the most part, just what we had hoped for.
With all that pesky planning and such out of the way, it was time to enjoy the road and the sights to be found along the way.
So what does a photojournalist do for a vacation, anyway? Why, go somewhere else to take a pile of photos, of course!
I rarely set my camera down — whether I am on the clock or not.
What I love about road trips are any eye-catching oddities and peculiarities on any route I take.
Off the freeway and onto rural roads is best, of course.
An added bonus was the planned route taking us by our old family cottage of 40 years, so we traipsed around and grabbed some photos to enjoy and loved the rekindled memories of one of my favourite places growing up.
After a night in Perth, we struck out into Quebec, as the AI brain intended us to.
My one wish to make road trips better would be for roads to have wider shoulders so I can quickly pull over safely and grab my camera when I spot something peculiar.
This southwestern part of Quebec seems to be lacking in the way of safe shoulders, but I made due with driveway entrances and such.
I love beat-up, old abandoned cars at the roadside, ancient log houses and dilapidated Victorian-era farm buildings.
We also took the time for a surprise drop-in to friends in Manotick, just south of Ottawa, but funny enough, they were in Toronto at the time. We ended up feeding their Koi fish in the pond, picked some nice flowers from their immense and stunning gardens to add to the road-trip bouquet jar Silvia was collecting, and off we went once again.
The best breakfast on the trip? The amazing crepes at Raffields in Knowlton, a sleepy little art-focused village near Lac Brome. We could live there. Seriously.
The best dinner? Again in Knowlton, a place called Bistro LeRelais, with a great steak to be had.
Was the best overnight stay also in Knowlton? Check! The place we laid our heads was inside an old hotel dating back to the 1840s. It was beautiful.
Thanks to Claude and its Opus 4.8, our travel-planning central computer brain hit a home run with this outing.
I guess you can add travel agents to that growing list of jobs on the AI-driven extinction list.
Progress, right?
Kevin Lamb is a photojournalist for Village Media.
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