We drove from Birch Bay, Washington, over the border to Canada. The minute you see the customs area, you see a big Canadian flag made of flowers. Oh, you Canadians. We drove to the nearest visitor’s center, where we found out that a summer weekend in Vancouver means extremely limited accommodations. No matter… we found a campsite close by in Delta, near Tsawassen, where we could take the bus to Vancouver and the shuttle to Victoria. After settling in at the campground, we navigated Canadian banks, money, supermarkets, and the like. We went to bed that night eagerly anticipating our day in Vancouver. We awoke with big raindrops dripping on our foreheads. Well, that’s how I woke up. Matt woke up by me having a cow at my new wet head. A crappy rain fly on our tent, indeed. We went to the Safeway to purchase bus tickets, and then took the bus into Vancouver. We saw Gastown, the Waterfront, and a big festival in Chinatown. My advice when touring a big city: take a bus tour. Let someone else do the driving, find the parking, show you all the good stuff, and avoid places like east of Hastings St. in Vancouver, which housed probably the worst ghettos I’ve ever seen outside the Tenderloin in San Francisco. At least the Tenderloin is small.
After our foray into a very sad part of town, we took another bus to Stanley Park, where we drank beer and walked around. We saw the Totem poles and then headed back to our bus. We had some trouble finding our bus stop, but eventually found it and headed back to camp. Matt had the great idea to use trash bags on the tent that night, as more rain and thunder was expected. It worked well except for the tiny corner we forgot. Sometime in the middle of the night, we awoke to find our foam pad and blanket slowly becoming drenched. Matt stuck it out like a champ, but I “slept” in the car. The next day, we checked into a hotel. Overpriced, but decent, and had a good pub. The next morning we went to Victoria. The ferry was fun, and we saw some beautiful inlets, coastline, and lighthouses. The boat ride was fun , too. It better be, considering the ferry tickets, and bus from Swartz Bay to Victoria cost us $110. Yes, you read that right. Victoria’s a nice little town, but kinda boring if you’re not on a tour and don’t have money to spend. There’s sea plane tours, the Fairmont Empress, and the Butchart Gardens, but just getting us there put us over budget. We wandered around and saw the Capitol Building, and then headed back on the world’s grumpiest bus.
The next day, we packed up the car and headed for Lake Louise, via Revelstoke. There’s some gorgeous scenery in British Colombia. We camped at our first KOA in Revelstoke. The next day we arrived at Lake Louise and hiked up to the lake from our campground. The lake was beautiful. We watched a fun program at the campground and retired for the night. We had a fitful night, however, and awoke at 6 am absolutely FREEZING. We threw the stuff in the car and drove to Lake Moraine, 13 miles from Lake Louise, and watched the sun rise. Lake Moraine is extremely blue, maybe even more so than Lake Louise. The rest of the day and the afternoon were spent driving to Montana, where we stayed in East Glacier Park. We drove briefly through Glacier National Park, and saw our first and only bear. It was smallish and slowly lumbered across the road! We continued on the next day to Southern Montana where we camped at another KOA just outside of Yellowstone. Next time, Yellowstone and beyond!
Well, it’s been quite a spell since the last post, and boy have we been busy. The last we left you we were in Astoria, a really nice little seaside town and one of our favorites that we visited. We took the town trolley that went along the boardwalk and found out that the town is where Kindergarten Cop and Free Willie 2 were filmed and was also the home of Goonies house. We were very impressed by the town’s movie credits, but more so with the lovely scenery. We also broke down and had some lovely seafood and beer. I had the razor clam sandwich and Diane had the tuna burger at the Wet Dog Cafe. The beer was also brewed on site and was very tasty. 
After Astoria we headed back to Portland so that we could check out the Flugtag presented by Redbull. It turned out to be a bust of sorts because it was so crowded that all the good views were taken. We saw many of the creative vehicles that were to be launched off of a towering platform into the icy waters of the Willamette. My favorites were a Back to the Future themed Delorean as well as the World of Warcraft zeppelin (For the Horde!). We even got to catch a couple of poorly viewed take-offs and “landings” before we headed out to see a little more of the downtown area, including the Chinese Gardens.
After that, we hung out a little while longer with Sterling and Carrie before we made our way into Washington. Kelso was where we decided to lay our heads at a crappy little Econolodge. Turns out they didn’t have any hot water in the morning. It was the coldest shower either one of us had ever taken. After swearing we were going to take our complaint to the folks on the internet, we made our way up to the 12 highway to see if we could make it to a good camping spot. Neither one of us really felt like making the trek all the way to Mt. St. Helen or Mt. Ranier, so we stopped somewhere in between at a great little hike-in campsite at Taidnapam. The lake nearby, lake Riffe, was absolutely gorgeous. It made me start really wanting to get a kayak or a canoe or something so that we could row off into the sunset. 
We then made our way back to the I-5 so that we could check out Olympia. Not much to tell about it other than that it is the Capital of Washington. I kinda wanted to see K Records where such wonderful bands as Beat Happening, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, and the Make-Up have made melodious sounds, but I didn’t really want to spend the time hunting it down, so we just wandered aimlessly for a while after consuming some stomach churning veggie Thai food. After our tour, we hunkered down at the Olympia Campgrounds for the night. It reminded me of something out of Meatballs, which is a good thing.
After Olympia, we headed to Seattle where we got a cancellation deal on a B&B called the Hill House, which was more than we wanted to ever pay for a place but were freaking out because it was Seattle and we hadn’t made any other plans. Seattle was excellent and we spent a couple of days roaming Capitol Hill, Pike Place Market, and Pioneer Square. We didn’t realize the town had so many hills, the biggest one seemed to lead from the waterfront up to the Space Needle (one of the more anticlimactic apexes that we traversed on our trip). We also took the tour of underground Seattle, on top of which much of present day Seattle was built. We had a good tour guide, but the tour was mostly them trying to make a buck off of walking around in decrepit basements. The history was fascinating nonetheless with my highlight of the tour being seeing old toilets and wooden plumbing. We unfortunately met some really cool people during our last breakfast at the B&B who had some insights into what to do culturally speaking, but we were ready to move on.
We then headed further North and tried exploring a bit more. We ended up passing through Bellingham, which we had heard about and sounded cool but looked to us like another hip little town with a college, so we headed into Ferndale, a really cool sleepy little town with a Mexican restaurant that we ate at. The owner of the place told us to camp at Birch Bay, so we did. It was beautiful, but was a little sullied by our anticipation of Canada. That and a big RV tried to park perfectly for much to long way after campground quiet hours. And I am going to leave it at that for the moment. Although we are in Cody Wyoming at the moment, it is getting quite late, and the blog is getting quite long. So to be continued fairly soon…
