This was the worst day of traveling, but we are grateful that it will be our last day in the car for a week.
The day began pleasantly enough at Ellen’s house.
Ellen is not only a wonderful organic gardener, but she has her own chickens in the back yard.
So breakfast on Sherman Street always includes the freshest and most delicious eggs you can imagine. Today, I decided that poached eggs on top of fresh avocado on top of toast made from Dave’s Killer Bread would be perfect. And it was!
Ellen is teaching summer session this year, so she took off before we did. I gave her dog a walk along with the two of mine. I’m sure somebody supposed that somebody riding a bike past me would have assumed that I was just a professional dog walker with three dogs and a couple bags of poop. Of course, the way things are going, pretty soon dog walking may pay better than the Board of Education does.
We locked up the house, put our two dogs in the car, and started out of town. As we crossed the Columbia River into Washington, John joked, “I just felt the sales tax go up and the IQs go down.” I was going to protest that Washington is the home of Microsoft, but then remembering Windows Vista I decided that he was probably right.
Daniel, our trusty GPS, was not at his most helpful today. He had us leave the freeway about 60 miles before Tacoma and drive down state route this and county route that. It was probably slightly shorter for total miles, but it had to have added at least 30 minutes to the trip. And Danny is usually so dependable.
We thought we were free and clear when we passed Seattle, but our traffic woes were only beginning. You know the old joke that in Chicago there are two seasons, winter and road repair? Evidently the same is true in Washington. They decided that highway 5 near Bellingham needed to be repaved and we crawled along as the dogs whimpered and whined. I suppose listening to them complain was karmic revenge for all the times I whined “Are we there yet?” when I was traveling with my parents.
Once at the border, we again thought we were lucky because there was virtually no wait. We called our landlord in Vancouver – while we still had an AT&T signal – to say we’d be there soon. We were so wrong.
The Fraser River is the largest river in British Columbia. Its estuary forms a good natural harbor, so it is an important port. As such, somebody thought in the 1950’s that a tunnel would be better than a bridge to allow river traffic. Well, the tunnel they build in 1959 may have been sufficient for the traffic of that era, but today it is woefully inadequate – to put it mildly. John and I spent close to an hour stuck there as 5 lanes to traffic had to merge into 1 lane crossing northbound under the river. We were there for so long that people left their cars and walked around. John did too, snapping this photo.
We did finally make it into town, though our landlord had give up on us and put the key under a flower pot. We are staying at the same apartment in West End where we stayed last time.
And why not? The apartment is reasonably priced, has a kitchen and a separate bedroom, takes dogs, and it in just about the most interesting neighborhood in Vancouver.
We unpacked the car and went for a walk. After a long day in the moving crate, we figured that the dogs needed to run free a bit. There’s an off-leash park nearby, and we took them there for some canine socializing. For the humans, it made for some fascinating people watching, too.
From there, we continued down toward Davies Street where we found a place where we could have dinner with the dogs on the sidewalk.
And from there we walked down to English Bay. All these references to England and the British names seem so ironic because almost everybody you see in Vancouver seems to hail from China or south Asia. The people you see who look European are almost invariably speaking some kind of Slavic language.
We found an empty beach and watched people walk by and the sun set.
One of our real reasons for coming this week to Vancouver is to see the “Festival of Light,” an international fireworks competition. The barge in the bay is already in place for it.
Tomorrow, only pedestrian adventures!
