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Published: July 28th 2019
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I have said in the past that if we set off without a plan, the day often has a plan for us. But the reverse can also be true. The day can often unravel well made plans by tossing a wrench in it all. Today was one of those days. We left our hotel at 8 AM and 62 degrees and raining, and headed north. Our plan was to drive to Vancouver and go back to the water’s edge to enjoy the view before proceeding on to Kamloops. Well, Border Control was the wrench. After spending an hour and a half in line at the border, (where 8 available lanes were only manned by 4 people) we no longer had time to go to Vancouver, so we had to turn east and go directly to Kamloops, which also did not go well, because everyone on the west coast seemed to be going in that direction, too. Traffic was very slow for a good deal of that drive. So, a 3.5 hour drive took us 7 hours. But…the view was just as good as ever, so we enjoyed the day in spite of it all.
Our first stop was for gas,
before we reached the border. This was a gas stop unlike any I have seen. It was a small strip mall which contains Foxy Lady Latte, a barber shop, Tiny Tim’s Tattoos, Gas & Go and The Joint. Now if you realize where we were, you will know what The Joint was. And if it had not been just before our border crossing, we might have gone inside and tried something new. (We have never done pot, but now that it is legal in many places, we have thought about trying it.) But of course, we could not. So we moved on.
We learned about a nice feature on the GPS of our new car. When we crossed the border, knowing that mileage and speed is measured in kilometers, I was going to try and figure out how to make some changes to the system to help us figure out how fast we could go. But we didn’t need to do that. The GPS mapper, which always tells us the speed limit in the area, instantly started converting all of the limits to miles, so we had to do nothing to make that adjustment. If the sign said 50
km/hr., our GPS said 31 mph. And I found that very convenient and very cool.
We saw lots more vineyards today along with corn fields. That was a first. We often see grapes growing near olives or almonds or sometimes pistachios. But not today. They were growing beside corn. We saw a lot of huge greenhouses when we first crossed over. I don’t know what they were growing in them…who knows, perhaps it was more grapes.
Well, my final comments about the NW has to be this: I don’t know what draws so many people to this area. I really don’t, except of course, the jobs in Seattle with companies like Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon. But the weather is not that great (it rains a lot), and the traffic is the worst I have ever seen anywhere. All of this has to cause a lot of stress in the lives of the people who live here. And that is my final comment on that.
Tomorrow, we plan to drive east through Banff and on to Calgary.
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Rudy Martzke
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A stunner: Taking 1 1/2 hours to cross the Canadian border.
I sometimes wonder if the long waits at the border are because the Canadians want to irritate Americans because of similar irritations for Canadians crossing the border.