Vancouver Canada was the tourist destination of the day. I haven’t crossed the border in quite some time, but I knew it was a more intense process nowadays. We had to wait in line for about 30 minutes both going across and coming back into the US. The border agents take your passport and ask you a few questions. The questions are not really important; they’re just to engage you in conversation so they can look for signs that would trigger further inspection. Entering the US you are also subjected to a barrage of electronic scrutiny. There are no less than 8 visible cameras and/or sensing devices as you pull up to the agent’s booth. Frontal and profile pictures of every driver entering the US are taken as you go thru this surveillance gauntlet. It doesn’t bother me any, I’ve got nothing to hide; I just hope the border intelligence gathering is doing some good.
Obviously nobody can see everything there is to see in an area, especially a city in one day. Millie and I don’t make a lot of solid plans; we just kind of wing it. Our first stop in Vancouver was the Bloedel Floral conservatory and the surrounding gardens in Queen Elizabeth Park. The domed conservatory is at the top of a granite hill in the park and the adjacent sculpted gardens are in what was once a rock quarry. We had a Chinese Garden and a Japanese garden on our list of possible sites to visit but cancelled both of them. We enjoyed the Bloedel gardens so much and spent so much time there we didn’t want to mix the experience with a different garden. I hope that makes sense and you know what I mean.
We drove through several different ethnic and/or cultural parts of the city. Vancouver has the most diverse mix of ethnicity we have ever seen. We saw and heard people and languages of every nationality imaginable. English is in fact the SECOND language for over half of the population. We also toured the waterfront, where we saw the New Italian captain of a cruise ship practicing the launch his personal lifeboat. Just kidding, but it was a great picture. After we had dinner it was time to go back to the US and we mutually decided that we had seen enough and would not be returning the next day. We seem to have an uncanny synchronization of gut feeling for a place, if one has seen enough, the other is usually in agreement. So tomorrow we break camp a day early and head south to Seattle.
We only have two things on the must do list for Seattle, we are going to go up in the Space needle tower and we want to see the King Tut exhibit which is currently in the city. But who knows, if it feels right we’ll stay and do more, if not,....well....the open road is always calling!
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