Travels With David, pt. IV

June 16, 2001: Couer d'Alene, ID - Vancouver, BC

I've discovered the 8th level from Dante's Inferno: it's in northeastern Washington, along the stretch of highway 395 that runs from Spokane to the Canadian border. All of the slowpoke drivers from every other part of the country, all of those idiots who have been cursed by righteous drivers for dawdling along at 10 mph below the speed limit and preventing anyone from passing them, every single one of them has been banished to northeastern Washington. Why there? Who knows ... maybe the Highway Gods believed that nobody else would ever be interested in taking this route into Canada. Nobody, that is, except David and me ... and it took forever.

At one traffic light on the outskirts of Spokane, I watched a McDonald's restaurant at the side of the road switch from their breakfast menu to their lunch menu, and then to their dinner menu, during the time that the driver in front of me contemplated the awesome task of navigating through the intersection. At another intersection, in Deer Park, David asked if he would have enough time to get a haircut at a roadside barber shop before the slug-like driver in front of us decided to creep through the light. On one stretch of route 395 past Clayton, it appeared that the driver in front of us had taken his poodle out for a walk; the poodle trotted alongside the car, and kept looking back expectantly, waiting for his master to catch up. Another driver had hung a sign in the rear window of his car, announcing that he had decided to take a short nap, and expected to be back in operation within a couple of hours. Further down the road, by Loon Lake, two drivers going in opposite directions had stopped to have a friendly conversation; their wives had pulled a barbecue grill out of the trunk, and were grilling hamburgers for their families and any other travelers who happened to creep by. And we passed a highway construction sign in Chewelah that informed us that a new bridge, a few miles further up the road, was expected to be finished by Labor Day weekend; David assured me that it would take us that long to get there, and that we would probably have the pleasure of driving over that new bridge.

Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad. But the 110-mile stretch from Spokane to the Canadian border did take all morning, and it was only during the last 20-30 miles that the scenery was pretty enough to compensate for the slow progress. There's not much to look at along the way: a couple of small towns (and that includes Boyds, a very small town), a few farms, some rolling hills and pastures. Some of it reminded me of the terrain in Tennessee and North Carolina; perfectly pleasant, but not particularly memorable.

The border crossing at Laurier was a bit odd, though it's probably similar to the hundreds of such minor checkpoints all along the U.S. - Canadian border. I thought it would be a good idea to fill up the gas tank on the US side of the border (who knows what of tricks those devious Canadians would try to pull on us innocent American tourists, right? They quote their prices in Canadian dollars per liter, and it's so hard to convert into US dollars per gallon that they could be over-charging us by a factor of ten without us even knowing it), but the gas station -- the only one for miles around -- had apparently gone bankrupt. Nevertheless, the pumps were working, but only if you inserted a credit card into the pump itself. Credit-card payments at the pump are pretty common, of course, but it never occurred to me that it could be used as a strategy to eliminate all human workers and employees; in this case, the deli/mart that usually accompanies gas stations was apparently unable to make a profit, so they just closed it up.

Anyway, we got our gas, assured the Canadian border guard that we were US citizens, and hadn't been arrested in recent memory (David had to think for a while about that one), and were waved into the country. A few short miles further north, we intersected with Highway 3, which took us all the way to Vancouver along a very pleasant and very scenic route. We stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen in Grand Forks, primarily because we couldn't find the A&W Root Beer establishment whose billboard advertisement David had spotted a few miles earlier. But it gave us a chance to compare the merits of Dairy Queen's "blizzard" dessert against the McDonald's "McFlurry"; David announced that one was thicker, and the other was crunchier, which didn't seem like a very useful distinction to me.

For the first half of the afternoon trip, we followed route 3 as it followed a zig-zag path just a few miles north of the border, through little towns like Greenwood, Midway, Rock Creek, and Osoyoos. Osoyoos turns out to be a respectable little town with a spectacular mountain backdrop; but I couldn't imagine growing up in a little town like that, and then venturing out into the wide, wide world to spend the rest of my life listening to people ask, "Where did you say you were from? Ossobuco? Osso-what?"

Notwithstanding the embarrassing name, we decided to fill up our gas tank in Ossoyoos, and David took over the driving chores. We continued on, through Olalla, Keremeos, and Hedley, as the mountains grew steeper, sharper, and more snow-covered. Hedley is an old gold-mining town nestled among towering peaks all around, and it reminded me somewhat of Ouray, in southwestern Colorado. Past Hedley, there's a stretch of some 83 miles of nothing but mountains and gorgeous views and a few farms; no towns, no villages, and almost no other cars. It was very quiet throughout this stretch, partly because we were busy watching the scenery, but also because David had not turned on the CD player all day long. I'm no sure whether he was bored with his music, or just in a quiet mood, but I decided not to ask; I'm sure the music will return in its own good time.

At Hope, we stopped for a quick snack, and I took over the driving for the remaining hundred miles to Vancouver. The terrain had leveled off at this point, and while it was pleasant farmland, it was nowhere near as spectacular as the earlier few hundred miles. As a point of reference, Hope is the town where route 3 joins up with route 5 from Kamloops, and the trans-Canada highway (route 1); I suspect that most people who drive around the better-known tourist areas of Banff and Jasper and Lake Louise (further north and west, closer to Calgary), take the trans-Canada highway in order to reach Vancouver, and thus never see the stretch that we covered.

In any case, we soon reached the suburbs of Vancouver, which stretch all the way eastward to Chilliwack; miles and miles of shopping malls and highway billboards eventually led us through Abbotsford and Langley and Surrey, and finally into Burnaby and the center of Vancouver. We navigated straight toward the center of town, with the help of a trusty road atlas, turned south onto Howe Street, and began looking for a hotel for the night. After spending the previous night at a budget hotel, with a mediocre dinner at the next-door IHOP restaurant (I know, you're supposed to have breakfast there, not dinner), I was in the mood for a really nice hotel and a good dinner. But the Four Seasons hotel on Howe Street was fully booked, as we ended up at a very pleasant Holiday Inn. Having never been to Vancouver before, David announced that he was going to skip dinner and go out for an evening walking tour of the downtown area; I opted for a nice dinner of broiled salmon and a glass of Chardonnay, and turned in early for a good night's sleep.

And thus, day 4 comes to a close. Another good day. Thank you, David.

Continue with pt. V of this series ...