Beautiful British Columbia

May 18, 2009
Fairmont Hot Springs, BC, Canada

Beautiful British Columbia. It must be: it's printed right on their license plates. :-)

Today, we made the first of several border crossings we'll have this summer. We had a nice driving day, an easy border crossing, and found our next park with no problems. Pretty good, eh?

The morning started off with a quick stop at the tire shop in Kalispell. As predicted, it only took them 1/2 hour to jack it up, remove the two rear wheels and put them back on the right location. No charge (not that I offered to pay). We were on the road by 8:30 AM.

It was a sunny and warm day to start, probably the nicest day in the whole time we were in Montana. It figures, but we were ready to be on the road. We arrived at the border crossing at Roosville, MT/BC, in short order. We had a very pleasant border crossing, potentially aided by the Victoria Day holiday weekend. First, most of the traffic going north was from Alberta, which was a bit of a surprise since the main routes into Alberta are further east. Second, only one lane (of 3) was open at Canadian Customs (short staffed after the holiday?) and the line was about 25 vehicles and growing when we arrived.

Just as we pulled into the queue, three US CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) staff and a nice German Sheppard took up a position about 50 feet from the border and started quizzing and sniffing the vehicles as they proceeded in the line. It was pretty perfunctory, with standard questions about citizenship, destination, weapons, and cash; no papers required. I guess we passed Fido's test as well, since they didn't make us stop.

Once we got to the Canadian checkpoint, it was almost a replay, except the agent was much more friendly than the US guys. She scanned our passports and asked all the standard questions. I declared that we were over the limit on alcohol by about 9 bottles of beer, and she said she'd assume that those were for personal consumption. It's a good thing we spent the extra time in Kalispell; we might not have gotten away with that if we still had our original quantity on board. With the questions out of the way, all she wanted to do was see Geri through the window to verify her presence, and we were good to go.

The drive from the border to Fairmont Hot Springs was about 2½ hours, all along Provincial Highway PH-93. We had mostly good roads with just a few stretches of rough pavement (slowing to ~80kph/50mph). We could tell that it's a bumper year for dandelions; many fields are almost completely yellow. The places where curves required slowing down were well marked, and we got a chance to practice our metric conversion. To be honest, I'd prefer that the US just get over our own selves and go metric; who knows how many tablespoons are in a cup anyway? Accordingly, I'm a "when in Rome" kind of guy, so I'll tend to pick up on and adopt the local measurements.

The park we're staying at is nice but pricey. We're a couple of hundred metres (pretty good, eh?) up-slope from the highway, right beneath snow-capped mountains. We'd pretty much eaten up our food reserves, so we made the short trip back down to the highway to visit the local grocery store. Whoops; sticker shock! We came away with a couple of small steaks, a couple of potatoes, and two ears of corn for C$25. I pulled out the grill and it all went on the barbie (Geri got out the mandoline and made nice potato slices baked in foil with shallot and pesto) so we ate well.

Over the next couple of days we'll explore the hot springs and the Columbia Valley. The weather's supposed to be "iffy" for the short term but we can't let that stop us, now can we?