Vancouver, 9.24.07

Well, we've made it to Vancouver. It's amazing here, with 10,000 foot peaks jutting out of the oceans and coves and bays. Really reminds of New Zealand, actually.

So we hung out in towns in Montana for a few days: Livingston, where we found a fantastic In-n-Out burger stand with cheap veggie burgers and Wilkinson's Montana ice cream (graham cracker and huckleberry for me, a coffee shake for the hubbie), as well as a belgian-style microbrewery. Stuck around there for 2 nights, recovering from the threat of bears in an overpriced Econo Lodge* and catching up on our eating. A beautiful white horse seemed to have been abandoned in a dirt corral just next door to the hotel for our entire Livingston stay. I fed it carrots, and called the humane society when we left to see if someone could check in on its well-being. Next, we stopped in Bozeman, where we hoped to meet up with an old college acquaintance and dear friend of Claire's, but just couldn't work it out. After just one night there, which almost didn't happen because of the meager and expensive camper accomodations of the town, we had visited the town's huge local brewery, sampled all of its pastries, found that the dance school had moved well outside of the center of town, spent a number of hours using its amazing library and free internet, and successfully slept in the van streetside in the rain without having to pay anyone a cent. The next day, we tried to stay longer to make it to the evening when Nikki and Adam were free, but the road was calling. We made it as far as the Montana-Idaho border at Lolo Springs, where we were able to soak our dirty bones in some hot hot water and exercise in a pretty frigid outdoor pool in the middle of the mountains. Jesse powered on all the following day and night to the Washington-Canada border. We stayed at a national parks campground in our tent, on a very temperate evening while the wind blew harshly through the trees, sounding everything like rain, but it never was.

The campsite at the border:
Now, about this Washington-Canada border: I knew it was apple season, and didn't anticipate how excited I would get once the apple trees began showing themselves through the Okanagan valley in Washington. Deep red apples were dotting trees everywhere along the roadside, like cherries, but 5 times the size. Farmstand followed farmstand, and the orchards were harvesting apples into huge boxes, some piled 10 high, 20 wide, on the sides of the road. We stopped at a stand that allowed me to pick both a green and a red one from some trees behind its shed, with only a little bullying from my end, and J and I wolfed them down as we crossed the Canada border. I had to put the remnants into a cooler past the border, as the guard said a simple garbage can would not do. Past the border, the apple trees continued as we entered Osoyoos, and further into British Columbian wine and farm country. Here's what I have to say about all that:

First, do you all know that the U.S. dollar is now worth less than the Canadian dollar? Last time I was here, it was about $1.50 to each $1 canadian, but now it's about 92 U.S. cents to $1 canadian. Pretty ugly. Things were also kind of expensive outside of Vancouver, so we had to watch it a bit. Although the area of British Columbia that we traveled through is wine country, the wines were really nothing to speak of, except for a certain berry winery, which we discovered after visiting a few other wineries, a hot springs town, and a herbal farm. (We passed the cheese farms, because how much can we really commit to eating more cheese on the road?) The woman at said berry winery told us that they harvest all their berries from the wild, and that berries grow wild everywhere along the roadside. We had a great extended conversation while she got us drunk on samples, and now we have an option to work with them next spring and summer, if we are in the area again. Also, at this very same winery, Sugi got terribly attacked by another dog, the ward of the woman in the testing room. She survived with some minor flesh wounds, but it was a pretty vicious attack to her neck, and I got a little bit up trying to wrench that stupid dog off of her. Funny enough, she seemed rather roused emotionally by the attack, though she did take a couple days to get back to her old self, recovering from the excitement of it all. We spent that night in an amazing spot up North Vancouver, on the water, a cove, where the beach was littered with HUGE petrified trees, and the campground was full of very loud people. We had a huge hike the day after, where I found some of the berries along the trails, blackberry-types, and they were TASTY. And today, we are doing the rounds of Vancouver, eating very well and staying at a decent little motor hotel right downtown. Vancouver is pretty awesome, but I'm sure we'll have more to say in the upcoming posts.

*Note: all the hotels seem overpriced these days. When did the median nightly price go up to $100? ??