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Canada has had a special appeal for the author from an early age. Its image in the mind of the nature-worshipping ambitious European youth was combining the vastness of the wild northern land-bounded by oceans on three sides, the unfathomable beauty of endless boreal forests, sun-kissed prairies, snow- and glacier-capped mountains and toughness-testing winters-with the lore of its Indigenous past and the relatively young history of the accomplishments of its newcomers from the outside of the continent. His image of Canadians was that of straight honesty, physical and mental strength, determination in achieving their goals, and a love of peace and freedom. In spite of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles, all this culminated in his decision to choose Canada as his homeland. He immigrated to Canada in 1968 after the Warsaw Pact invaded his birth country of then Czechoslovakia. He arrived with a fresh MSc in Nuclear Engineering and settled with his Czech fiancée in Edmonton. Here, after ""seven skinny years,"" he obtained a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Alberta. Using his qualifications as a means of earning a living, he ended up working at UCLA and in world-renowned research establishments of particle physics in Canada, the USA and Europe, including the LHC Supercollider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. He finally settled back in Edmonton working at the UofA as a Detector Engineer/Physicist until 2011, when he retired.Throughout his modern frontier science work in Canada, there has always been the awareness of his wilderness backyard in the back of the author's mind, which drew him to Canada in the first place. He devoted most of his spare time to his hobbies: wilderness hiking, canoeing, skiing, cycling, dog sledding and riding, especially after his children grew up and left home (see his first book, Seven Campfires to the Nahanni, available on Amazon).

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9781779410856

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Following his retirement in 2011, at the age of 67, the author finally fulfilled his long-time dream to transport his solo canoe to Montreal and retrace the historic fur trade canoe route west across Canada. Through the sequence of consecutive summer seasons and some previous expeditions in Alberta, he connected the route from Montreal all the way to the Rocky Mountains. His last segment took place in 2022 when he was 78. The author thus got to know his beloved chosen homeland very intimately. In his own words, he could not call his sharing of the adventurous experience anything else but ""Embracing Canada.""

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