Originally written in August 2009
June
& July 2009
This trip came about
because Nicholas needed to move his stuff from Urbana, Illinois, to
Victoria British Columbia. The rest of us flew out there to help with
moving and to have a road trip. Some of the days are necessarily more
interesting than others. I’ve focused more on the ‘holiday’
bits since there only so much that can be written about packing
boxes, loading trailers, paperwork, and shopping for sofas.
Monday 15th (Spent
flying to Chicago)
After eight hours sat down
on a plane you would think that being forced to stand in a queue for
over an hour wouldn't be as difficult as it might be in normal
circumstances. Unfortunately when the thing that takes over an hour
is US immigration at Chicago airport my patience starts to fray. I
have no problem joining a long queue as long as there is no possible
way the queue could be made to move more quickly, Roller coasters and
tall buildings being good examples. The problem at Chicago was that
the entire immigration system seemed to be overloaded by more than
one airplanes worth of people. The queue would've easily lasted more
than two hours if the US Citizens lanes hadn't been opened to
everyone. Presumably this is standard procedure or they risk a mutiny
from the workers processing hundreds of foreigners while their
colleagues sit idle waiting for the thirty Americans on the next
flight. The only upside to this ridiculous wait is that when our turn
came the officer was in hurry up mode and didn't bother with all the
usual suspicious questions about your intentions and the retina
photographs.
Tuesday 16th (Spent
packing and loading)
Down to business. For some
curious reason, presumably to do with franchising agreements the
U-Haul trailer was in care of an Interstate Batteries store just out
of town. Appropriately it was a Canadian trailer, with a New
Brunswick logo adorning the side. It was a little rusty in places and
the orange stripe on the front was pockmarked with insect impacts,
but it fitted to the car fine and its lights all worked. So we headed
back to base and loaded up. The trailer came with a trolley to shift
boxes and I made myself feel useful by shuttling the bigger things
around to the lift and down to the car park.
Wednesday 17th
We were all ready to go on
Wednesday morning but the apartment manager wasn’t so we had to
hang around for half an hour outside the office until somebody came
back in order to give the key back. Combined with another wait at
Nicholas’s office to receive a fax it was half past ten before we
finally got going on the road. Passing Peoria we managed to drive for
fifteen miles up the wrong interstate (the one heading back north
east to Chicago) before realizing the mistake and turning around.
This is where the mile markers on the roadside are useful, since it
was reading these and thinking ‘well that’s not the correct
distance’ that clued me up to the fact that we’d evidently been
filtered onto the wrong motorway in the roadworks in Peoria. We
continued with a certain resolve to pay more attention to navigation.
After
an afternoon on the interstate the scenery gradually dribbled into a
more built up area and finally into Des Moines, Iowa. With the prior
knowledge from passing the same way in 2006 that the interstate runs
through the downtown in a cutting and that the city isn’t visible
from that route I opted instead to take us round the north suburbs
and stop in the Merle Hay Mall. Since it was built in the 1960s it’s
practically a historic building by Midwestern USA standards, but only
the exterior and the space age entrance sign betray its age; it’s
blandly modernised inside. You'd think they might try to push the
'retro' angle a bit more as a ploy to attract curious passers-by,
even if all that is done is dress up all the shops with 1960s logos
and park a few old cars out front. The day ran out west of Des Moines
in the small town of Walnut, on the edge of a thunderstorm that had
enlivened the last twenty minutes of driving.
Thursday 18th
Interstate highways in the
USA run primarily north-south and east-west so our progress from Iowa
to South Dakota involved following one interstate west to the
Missouri and another one hundred and eighty miles north via Sioux
City, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, where the next interstate runs west
across South Dakota. South Dakota is quite a dull place for the most
part, except for the south western corner where there are mountains,
Mount Rushmore and the craggy expanses of the Badlands. We had lunch
in Mitchell, a typical South Dakota town. A large area of gas
stations and restaurants to service the interstate and a real town a
mile down the road to provide people to work at the gas stations and
restaurants. Presumably not all of these people are working towards
university or that unspecified American further education
establishment called ‘school’. There must be some benefits to
living in a small town in the middle of a big flat state. Making
friends must be easier and there’s less traffic and more space. It
can’t be a coincidence that lots of good rock bands started in dull
small towns. On the other hand you have to have friends since you’d
never afford the trip to Des Moines or Chicago or somewhere else
where interesting things happen on your own. Perhaps it just the
state of the economy at the moment, or young Americans are generally
more polite than young Britons, but it seemed that a worryingly high
proportion of the service staff were young, well turned out, well
spoken, and generally seemed capable of more than working at
McDonalds.
We
arrived at the Badlands National Park in late afternoon. The Badlands
comprises several different landscapes; dramatically eroded valleys
that resemble a giant disused quarry, a large grass plain, and some
meadows. The visitor centre had a rather bland film about the area.
It had one of those voiceovers that are slightly too drawn out and
seem to take ages to say anything. We drove around the main park road
with the lowering sun and fairly clear sky making the place look very
photogenic. The road was clearly designed to take in the most number
of different environments as possible. It ran over the main ridge
like a mini alpine pass, straightened out over a meadow, (the fence
posts providing perches for the local birdlife), then wandered around
some low hills. One trail was marked on the map as 'fossil trail',
which it was, insomuch as there were four or five weatherproofed
boxes with dusty fossils inside next to a wooden boardwalk. It was a
curiously half baked feature by American National Park standards and
a strange mismatch of effort to build a boardwalk, a car park, some
restrooms, and then give up on the exhibits. I suspect the fossils
might actually have been an afterthought added later, when nobody
could find a spare case in the visitor centre.
One
place where plenty of effort has been made is the nearby town of
Wall. From as far away as Sioux Falls the interstate was decorated
with signs advertising Wall Drug, the rather awkward name given to
one of the largest shops in the country that isn’t part of a
national chain. It’s nice that the area has something famous to
boast about but they don’t half boast about it every few miles with
ugly billboards. I didn’t see anything worth getting excited about
on the tens of billboards we passed.
Friday 19th
After two days of driving
across flat farmland and empty plains it looked like being a more
interesting day. Partly this is because western South Dakota’s most
prominent mountain has four heads carved into it. One of my
overriding impressions of Mount Rushmore is how well preserved and
tidy it all is despite its age - if the heads were real people they
would be pensioners by now, albeit well preserved pensioners. Had it
been finished last year it wouldn’t look too different. The
mountain is thirty kilometres from and five hundred metres above the
interstate at Rapid City. The monument provided some help to make
Rapid City a bigger city although it was the Ellsworth Air Force Base
that doubled the city population during WWII. Ellsworth is home base
for the B1 Bomber and one of them glided over us as we drove into the
city on the interstate.
Not
only has Mount Rushmore been very well preserved physically but the
choice of presidents has stood up well. The Native American
population may not have been too impressed by a giant monument of
four white men being carved out of a sacred mountain but you’d have
to say that Gutzon Borglum did at least
choose the four best candidates at the time. Had he been more of a
slave to fashion then President’s Taft and Harding could be up
there with Washington and Lincoln, like those Channel Four ‘100
Greatest’ programmes where the current
flavours of the month slot into 7th, 3rd
and 2nd on the countdown. There is still a large space to
Lincoln's left where a fifth head could be added. If any tedious
cynical person suggests that this will inevitably be filled with some
minority person as a token gesture you can point out that back in the
thirties they were going to put the suffragette campaigner Susan B.
Anthony there until presumably somebody pointed out that this would
be a dangerously progressive thing to do. Considering that even today
Washington's coat is still only in the 'rough draft' stage and
Lincoln's hair is a large chunk of cliff face it's unwise to blame
the lack of a fifth figure on conservative thinking when it was
actually a lack of money and momentum. I can picture the workers
getting to the stage they did and thinking 'that's good enough; I'm
getting sick of being up here'.
The
same cynical people can look around the Western US landscape and
wonder if there are any natural features that aren't 'sacred' to the
natives. I'm a little equivocal on this one. The roads and cars make
the landscape seem smaller than it would've been in previous
centuries. It took us a few minutes to drive up the hill to Mount
Rushmore on a big wide highway and a few hours to drive to Wyoming
and Devil's Tower in the afternoon. Trekking across the hills on
horses I can imagine how on finding a dramatic rock face at the top
you would be more inclined to think of it as sacred. On the other
hand it is irritating when the only reason to ban people from rock
climbing is some immovable idea of sacred importance that seems
totally out of proportion to the figures. The native stories may
indeed be venerable but the rocks of Devil's Tower predate them by a
few hundred million years or so.
Devil's
Tower is conveniently close enough to Mount Rushmore to allow both to
be visited in a day even with American speed limits. Towing a heavy
trailer with a moderately powerful car at least makes the speed
limits seem a bit less restrictive. A very tiny bit less restrictive.
At least the roads were fairly quiet and free from RVs, as one might
hope for when driving to a famously mystical landmark in the manner
of a pilgrimage to a cathedral. There are few other places that
change so much depending on where they're being seen from. From a
distance the rock tower looks like a giant tree stump. One of
several, in fact, since there are several other less dramatic looking
formations nearby. Up close it takes on its more familiar shape,
although I expected its base to be flush with the surrounding ground
like Uluru in Australia rather than up on a forested hill - the whole
area was generally hillier than I had been anticipated. We had some
lunch at a surprisingly slow restaurant near the park entrance. Most
of the staff were teenagers and all the American 'HaveANiceDay'
service training in Wyoming can't entirely change that fact.
Saturday 20th
If you can make it across
Iowa and South Dakota without dying of boredom then you’ll find
that the driving gets a little bit more interesting the further west
you go. In Montana and Wyoming the interstate highway stops being a
giant conveyor belt trundling through endless fields on its way to
another petrol station and becomes a road with corners and hills and
towns to drive past. The speed limit is still stiflingly conservative
but at least it feels like there’s progress being made. In western
Wyoming is Yellowstone, the Mecca for RVs, caravans, motorhomes,
pickup trucks and SUVs. You wonder why they bother really, given all
the miles and miles of fire damaged trees (remnants of an epic forest
fire in 1988) Yellowstone isn’t the most lovely place to be,
especially, as was the case this day, when there’s thunderstorms
about. Perhaps all the RV-ers are practicing dodging lightning for
when they retire to play golf in Florida.
You
can’t really win with lightning. You can’t stand under trees, and
you can’t stand out in the open. Obviously the chances of being
struck are miniscule but there are places, like the boardwalk at the
Yellowstone geyser basin, that feel comically exposed. This is a way
of explaining why, when wandering round the aforementioned boardwalk
in the rain, I instinctively dropped my umbrella when a big spark of
static jumped into my wrist from the umbrella. Since nobody nearby
came running over to tell me that I’d been hit by lightning, and
since my ears hadn’t exploded, the rational part of my brain
assumed that it was just a bit of lively atmospherics. The irrational
part took a minute or two to stop gibbering.
Yellowstone
seemed busier than I remembered it from when two of us went there in
2003. That was in September, which may explain that, although over
time my mind has probably been retroactively removing hundreds of
people and cars from places to make them seem less busy than
they really were. Most of the people were doing exactly what we were
doing; driving to see the Old Faithful geyser and have some lunch in
the excellent lodge, one of the best of the national parks. It’s
almost worth going to without all the surrounding geysers. Most of
the geysers in the park erupt at all kinds of odd hours or go for
months without doing anything. The visitor centre had expected
eruption times posted on boards, and, as the name suggests, Old
Faithful was by far the more reliable. It even had the good grace to
wait until the rain had stopped. After lunch the rain returned so we
decided to drive on west as far as possible. ‘As far as possible’
turned out to be Butte, Montana.
Sunday 21st
Its six hundred miles from
Butte to Seattle and we successfully managed it all in one day. It
wasn’t a day for much sightseeing on foot, but there’s a few
mountains to cross in Idaho and Washington states so the roads are
quite scenic. The mountain passes in Idaho are quite dramatic and
probably quite exciting for the truck drivers crawling up the hills
and then rolling down again. At the bottom on one of the valleys we
stopped mid-morning at nice little town called Wallace. Its whole
main street was designated a historic district. It was fairly quiet
with the odd pickup truck driving past and occasional tourists like
us wandering around at the far end of the town. Some of the shops
were open, including the big old fashioned bric a brac store that was
next to the pizza takeout place – that was closed until noon.
Unfortunately for them we were gone before that, back on the
interstate. There wasn’t much open in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho at
lunchtime at Sunday, except McDonalds and the gas stations. Those
anti-globalization people might have to suspend their principles when
it comes to driving big distances on the American interstate on a
Sunday. Either that or go without lunch.
Having
spent a few hours driving across the flat middle bit of Washington
the truck drivers faced an even tougher hill to climb to get to
Seattle. The flat plain ends with a long bridge across a lake and
then a six hundred metre climb up into the mountains. Generally
speaking the more dramatic a motorway is the further apart the two
carriageways will be and on this bit the traffic going the other way
was a long way off to the left. Towing the trailer you could get a
feel for the kind of torque big trucks need to get over the hills. Or
the kind of suspension they need to get over the curiously corrugated
surface of the bit of interstate we drove over down in the next
valley. Eventually, having driven over a few thousand juddering bumps
in half an hour, car, trailer and cargo made it to Seattle in the
early evening. It was grey and raining, unsurprisingly.
Monday 22nd
So we’d made it to
Seattle without losing the trailer, or crashing the trailer, or
having the trailer stolen, or having the trailer set on fire. And
without crashing the car, having the car stolen, having the car break
down, being pulled over by the police, or getting caught in any
traffic jams. And without losing any wallets, or having money stolen,
or being shot by men called Billy Bob and Cletus LeRoy, or being
blackmailed by women called Jenna and Misty, or being abducted by
aliens. No serious problems in other words (although the blackmail
thing would make this worth a bit more to the tabloids). Not that the
tabloids in the far western corner of Washington State would be
interested. They would only be interested if there were some kind of
connection to ‘Twilight’ (it’s like Harry Potter only with more
vampires and its set in the area). Given the number of British people
playing vampires at the moment I could perhaps get away with
pretending to be one.
The
car ferry to Victoria sails from Port Angeles, a smallish Hull-like
port town north of Olympic national park, rather than Seattle. Towing
a trailer meant we couldn’t drive up some of the mountains in the
park. We wouldn’t have been able to see anything because of the low
clouds. So we went and had a look at a lake (very nice) and trundled
around the local roads in a big circle past several dusty looking
road work crews. Back in Port Angeles we had a look around the
waterfront, passing en route a few tens of shops selling Twilight
merchandise, a café called ‘Bella’s Place’ (that’s one the
characters) and some BMX riding teenagers making good use of the
waterfront boarding ramps. Right at the end of harbour front was a
small viewing tower, about two stories tall and enthusiastically
autographed by the local youth population. There were a few places to
eat but it was the kind of town where anywhere decent was full, so we
went back to same place we’d been to for lunch – an ok kind of
place where most of the local OAPs appeared to come for lunch and the
walls were covered in twee paintings of wildlife.
Tuesday 23rd
The nice thing about car
ferries compared to aeroplanes is that you can sit in your own car
while you wait for everyone to decide that they’re ready. There’s
something nice and relaxing about waiting for a ferry in a car.
There’s all the benefits of driving; privacy, quiet, snugness,
without the hassle of actually having to drive the next forty miles.
Also, the universal sense of paranoia that has settled over airports
in the last decade hasn’t quite managed to infiltrate ferry
terminals. It took a fair amount of time to get into Canada but it
was all pretty civilized with none of the militaristic overtones of
US airports. One of the immigration officials even stood around for a
chat. Even the person in the car next to ours who’d driven north
from Mexico and was having his cars crevices searched wasn’t being
frisked for weapons or anything.
Having unloaded the
trailer I could have done with a bit of a sit down on a sofa.
Unfortunately Nicholas’s new apartment wasn’t furnished and it
was a bit late to be setting out on a furniture buying expedition. So
we went to a restaurant instead. It was quite a nice place that
served an unspecific menu of slightly overpriced food for out of
shape middle aged people. There was a bar but the wine list seemed
like the more popular choice since it didn’t involve standing up
and embarking on a long trek across a room. The only person who was
sat there was one of the staff on a break. She briefly created the
illusion that the place was a hangout for thirtysomething single
professional types. Maybe it was a deliberate ploy to attract more
single businessmen who will eventually come back when they are
married and drink lots of wine.
Wednesday
24th (first day in Victoria)
Errand time. As I
mentioned earlier we didn’t have any furniture so we kept hold of
the trailer for another day to go and get some. On the north side of
Victoria is as very large Salvation Army warehouse that had a few
cheap sofas and mattresses and so forth. The rain did its best to get
everything wet but we didn’t have far to walk to load things into
the trailer. Next up was a supermarket, and then a second hand
furniture shop for a table, then finally the trailer could be given
back to U-Haul. A week is a long time to be hauling a trailer around
and we’d all had enough with lumbering around, grounding the tow
bar on bumps and generally having to be slower than normal. We drove
the newly liberated car round to a mall so we could have a drink and
to let the car enjoy the feeling of only taking up one space in the
car park. Victoria has several hills dotted around its north side and
we went to drive up one and have a look at the view.
Thursday
25th
This day never quite got
going to be honest. Firstly I wanted to do some laundry, which took
an hour. Then Nicholas needed to go to the bank, which took an hour.
Then another hour went by as we had some lunch in town at the Royal
BC Museum café. Then another diversion for furniture at another
Salvation Army shop, this time in the town centre. Then we drove to
the cable TV place, which might’ve taken an hour. All I recall is
that it was about three PM and the useable day was rapidly running
out and at that time of day everything seemed to be taking twice as
long as it needed to.
Like
the day before we drove up a hill to take in a view. This hill
however was the hill with the observatory and Nicholas’s new office
on it. The observatory was built in 1918 and had visitor centre next
door rather grandly (or sarcastically) called The Centre of The
Universe. There were a few models of telescopes, bits of cameras and
other equipment on display, as well as a very old drinks vending
machine. The staff showed Nicholas and me how to open it without
paying any money.
Friday 26th
In an ideal world a UK
citizen could move to Canada from the USA with no potential problems.
Just present a few bits of paper to show you have a legitimate job
and a passport to show you are who you say you are. Unfortunately
it’s not as simple as that. The USAs ‘visa waiver’ program has
apparently been designed on the assumption that any European going
across the border to Canada for a few days is either on holiday or on
a business trip from Europe. Moving to Canada and then wanting to
come back into the USA is an absolute classic bureaucratic grey area.
And being refused entry to the USA is not something you want to
happen if you ever want to go back there for the rest of your life.
In fact they’d probably refuse to bury your coffin on American soil
if you’d been refused entry once upon a time. It probably wouldn’t
have mattered. There probably wouldn’t have been any problem. We
decided to stay in Canada. Call us silly yellow chicken wusses but I
say that fear of US immigration is not an irrational fear.
Having
been to the Royal BC Museum café on Thursday we had a look round the
rest of it today. The first floor is a natural history museum, with
the usual dioramas and dimmed lighting. The second floor is an
anthropological museum, with the usual cases of artifacts and
recreated interiors. Hidden in there somewhere is an IMAX screen but
that was only showing National Geographic Films. The first floor was
fairly unremarkable. They’d done a good job of recreating the local
environments, but it wasn’t especially diverting. If Vancouver
didn’t have such an awful lack of museums for grown-ups (more on
this below) there wouldn’t be much reason to come to Victoria just
for the first floor of the Royal Museum. The second floor was better,
not because it had anything remarkable in it, (no Hope Diamond or
SR-71 spy plane), but because they hadn’t missed a single subject
matter. There was a room full of household items, exhibits on mining,
logging, farming, salmon canneries, explorers, shipping companies,
railways, and, of course, the First Nations. There was also a street
with a hotel, a cinema, a garage and a Chinatown. The hotel wasn’t
just a façade; it had an interior with a grand staircase. The cinema
worked and the shop fronts were clearly the result of much effort
from local historians. It was all fantastic and the city should be
proud of it. The exhibits on the natives were peppered with notices
informing us of recent treaties over ownership and the contradictory
message that many of the artifacts that were “on display” had
been “returned to native communities”. Clearly there was some
uncertainty about the future of the exhibits; whether natives wanted
to set up their own museums or were happy to leave things on loan
where they were. It’s a problem without a satisfactory solution
since the Indians and other groups had their land confiscated before
the world became an almost infinitely more complicated place and it
can’t simply be ‘given back’. Most of Canada is probably owned
by the Saudi royal family or Russian oil barons anyway.
In
the evening we spotted another road to go for a drive on; a causeway
in Esquimalt, the town to the west of Victoria. The town is
effectively a navy base with houses and McDonalds attached. The map I
had didn’t mark that one of the roads had a security post on it and
was private, quite a big omission in a map, but since Canada hasn’t
got to the British stage of sending police to intercept people for
being near to restricted areas we could turn around and scarper
without problem. The causeway ran out over a lagoon where some of the
local amateur photographers were training lenses on the herons. We
drove back to Victoria via the outlying semi-rural neighbourhoods and
its very twisty roads. After days rolling along motorways towing a
trailer it seemed like the car had earned something more exciting.
Saturday 27th (round
trip to Pacific Rim National Park)
By European standards
Vancouver lsland is quite a big place. It’s nearly three hundred
miles end to end. The distance from Victoria to Nanaimo is roughly
the same as Sheffield to Birmingham. The round trip to the Pacific
Rim National Park that we drove on this day is equivalent to a round
trip to the Lake District from Sheffield. Like the Lake District it
will also rain on you in western Vancouver Island, a geographical
quirk that the western side is much wetter than the east and the city
of Vancouver. There are even rainforests.
It was a little galling
to reach the visitor centre and look at the weather forecast for the
week; rain, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun. The park takes up a part of
the western coast with various different bits of forest, some
beaches, a couple of towns at each end (Ucluelet in the south, and
Tofino in the north), and a smallish airport incongruously cut out of
the forest like something from the Amazon. At the points where the
forest was at its most ancient there were wooden boardwalks running
out into the trees. We stopped at one and had a wander along the
path, taking note of the ‘Beware of Bears’ signs. Unless the
bears were Goths or Tim Burton fans there wasn’t much for them;
just lots of looming, damp trees with dangling tussles of moss,
tangled roots, and an awful lot of quiet. The boardwalk was an
impressive bit of wood engineering, and provided the sensation of
floating a few feet above the forest floor.
Further up the coast was
a long beach, called, with a dash of inspiration, Long Beach. There
were a few surfers venturing into the water. Despite the
un-photogenic grey sky it was probably ok weather for surfing. There
was a bit of a swell and it had stopped raining. A few miles north of
the beach was a small road up to an old wartime radar station, now
just an open concrete bare patch. The clouds obscured the distant
view to the north although even with clear skies the trees were tall
and blocked out the near views. The area needed some kind of tower
like the one on the waterfront in Port Angeles.
‘Tofino’
sounds like the name of some hip suburb of San Francisco rather than
a small, rainy Canadian harbour town. The locals have tried their
best to make the town fit the name and the advent of surfing has
helped the cause. There are coffee shops and surfing gear shops
aplenty. It was late in the afternoon and we’d been without food or
drink for a few hours so we stopped in a coffee shop near the middle
of town, (or as near to the ‘middle’ as it’s possible to get in
a small harbour town). It was quite small and very yellow, and had a
good selection of calorie-tastic cakes. The nineteen-eighties came
booming out of the speakers in the background, making the whole place
seem like one of those John Hughes (RIP) movies that I’ve never
watched, obviously. (Actually, I have the seen The Breakfast Club
once on TV)
Tofino was the most
westerly point of our travels. The rest of the day was spent
backtracking along the same roads Victoria. Near Port Alberni (where
we’d stopped at midday at a Boston Pizza restaurant whose staff
were reluctant to get us the bill) was a large stand of large ancient
trees surrounding the road called Cathedral Grove. Like the trees in
the National Park they were very tall and almost impossible to
photograph without an extremely wide angle lens.
Sunday 28th
Victoria is apparently the
most ‘English’ city in North America. Let’s look at the
evidence. Appearing for the defense is the large statue of Queen
Victoria, the posh hotel, the shop selling Iron Maiden t-shirts, the
John West tuna in the supermarket, the word ‘Royal’ in various
titles, the waxworks museum and the Butchart Gardens - a large
landscaped flower garden that we spent the afternoon visiting.
Appearing for the prosecution is the lack of speed cameras, the Orca
watching tours, the ‘Save On Foods Arena’, and the girl in the
t-shirt shop was cheerful and said ‘hiya’ to me, not a British
shop-keeping trait in my experience (with the exception of Katy from
my shop, although technically I wasn’t ever a customer
there).
As far as landscaped
flower gardens go the Butchart Gardens were quite interesting. They
could be a victim of their own success actually – it’s so well
kept that nothing is out of place and you could take it all for
granted. The gardens divide into three main areas; to the left of the
main entrance is an area created in the site of an old quarry, with
plants and trees growing up the sheer sides. To the right, running
down to a sheltered cove, is a Japanese garden. The centerpiece is a
rose garden and a large lawn in the English style. In fact the whole
place is in the English style, not the cutesy olde-England Jigsaw box
style but the believable clone of somewhere in England style. Like
the bits of the All England Tennis Club that aren’t tennis courts.
We
drove to the ferry to Vancouver, hoping that early on a Sunday
evening wasn’t too busy. It wasn’t. The ferry is actually
advertised as the ‘Swartz Bay – Tsawwassen’ ferry, two places
that are so small they don’t appear on many maps that foreign
tourists are likely to have in their possession. The name ‘Vancouver’
doesn’t appear anywhere. Still, the Vancouver ferry is the largest
one – the others are more like Marines landing craft than car
ferries.
The
ferry gave us a good view of some of the houses on Saltspring, North
Pender, Galiano and Mayne islands. There are hundreds of islands
around Swartz Bay and Vancouver, and most of them seem to be
inhabited. One of them had lost an inhabitant somewhere though; the
main preoccupation of the newspapers at this time was a 17 year old
called Jodi Henrickson who had vanished from one of the islands just
west of Vancouver. Unsurprisingly Ms. Henrickson was quite photogenic
and ‘sociable’, and her boyfriend was under suspicion. (They
still haven’t found her as I write this).
We’d
decided to leave Vancouver for later and continue to the Canadian
Rockies first. Finding the way around south Vancouver wasn’t easy
with a USA map that only included Canada on a large scale that didn’t
show all major roads in Vancouver. All the motorways run into the
middle, to get from the ferry terminal to the eastern suburbs
requires a little juggling of minor dual carriageways and following
signs. Amazingly we made it to the suburb of Abbotsford without
getting lost or being shuffled off to the middle of nowhere on an
interstate
Monday 29th
Now that we were back on
the open road without a trailer in tow I could do some driving. I
could’ve easily done some driving earlier but it’s not like I’m
itching to take over at any opportunity because Nicholas drives too
slowly or carelessly or anything. I also wasn’t envious of towing a
big lumbering U-Haul trailer full of stuff that didn’t belong to
me. I’m also not as well conditioned in the spotting of North
American style police cars. On the flat plains of the US Midwest
that’s an important skill – police cars parked in the median seem
to appear from nowhere. Fortunately for me the British Columbia
landscape was hillier than Iowa and the undulations gave more
visibility of potential police cars. There wasn’t much traffic on
the motorways and they were all going at a reasonable speed. The
scenery was nice too.
After
two and a bit hours we stopped at a service station at the
interestingly named town called Kamloops (less of a name of a town,
more that of a car engine part). American service stations are vast,
of course, but they don’t have as much variety as British ones.
There aren’t as many flavours of crisps (I’ve recently had this
independently confirmed by someone from South America), or
sandwiches, or drinks, and especially magazines and newspapers. There
are more ‘energy drinks’ (although they all taste the same) and
caffeinated Starbucks by-products like iced tea. There’s more dried
beef jerky, more types of Kelloggs bars and more car polish. In
Canada they have more sandwiches, which is nice if its lunchtime, but
the magazine situation is still disappointing. The strange thing is
that the magazines they do have deal with what seems like a small
niche – “Automatic Weapon Collector”, or “Latino Pickup Truck
Driver”. Maxim or Esquire are often the only ones
that I’ve heard of.
We
spent the next few hours driving up the Thompson River valley. North
of Kamloops there were lots of burnt trees from a large fire in 2003.
All the towns in the area seemed devoted to campsites. To be honest
the view was quite repetitive; the occasional small town, trees,
hills, campsites - all just a tiny little fraction of Canada. It’s
a big place. You wonder how the train drivers stay awake.
Tuesday 30th
The long drive had taken
up most of Monday. We’d driven across the Rockies to Hinton,
Alberta, an anonymous place that didn’t seem worth investigating.
We’d had tea in a nice Chinese restaurant next door to the motel
(it was more of a restaurant that served Chinese as well as other
things). Interestingly enough Hinton is on the same latitude as
Sheffield, although its winters are colder. We back tracked along the
road from Hinton back to Jasper. If Aspen is the unofficial capitol
of the American Rockies then Jasper is the Aspen of Canada. Except
that Banff could also make a claim to being the tourist trap
epicentre of the area. We had a look at Maligne Canyon, a few miles
south east of Jasper. The ‘canyon’ was more like a rock crevasse,
with the river churning around at the bottom. A path from the car
park ran down the east side of the gorge for a short distance before
crossing the gap on a bridge and continuing down the hill. We walked
down to bridge, saw looked at the path continuing down to
who-knows-where, then turned around and had a walk around the
upstream section, where the canyon was shallower but had more
energetic churning water.
The
road through the mountains runs south east from Jasper to Calgary.
It’s called ‘The Icefields Parkway’, a grand name for what is
essentially a road. It’s scenic enough, but it doesn’t cross any
actual glaciers. We drove south to the Athabasca Falls, essentially a
slightly bigger version of the Maligne Canyon. Not as deep and
narrow, but with more water rushing through. A few intrepid visitors
were venturing out onto the rocks around the waterfall. This wasn’t
illegal, the signs merely cautioned against getting too ambitious.
Unlike at Yellowstone hot springs the danger was a bit more obvious.
There was a big drop into the canyon. Although never underestimate
what people are capable of - I have read that once somebody jumped
into one of the boiling pools at Yellowstone to rescue a dog. As you
do. When he climbed out he said something like ‘That was really
stupid wasn’t it?’ and died a few hours later in hospital.
At its highest point the
road passes the foot of the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia
Icefield. Naturally there was a visitor centre and somewhere for
lunch. The weather gradually rolled in so by the time we went to look
at the glacier it was snowing. Somehow the wind contrived to blow the
snow into our faces both climbing up and coming back down again.
Along the path were markers showing how far the glacier had receded
(1.5 kilometres in the 125 years people have been watching.) Further
down the road the snow vanished and summer returned again just in
time for a fabulous view down the river valley. Nearly every car that
was passing stopped for a look at the viewpoint. A couple of crows
were perched on the barrier accepting donations of bread.
After a brief stop to
admire the view at Peyto Lake (another long view down a valley), we
turned off the Icefields Parkway short of Banff and drove back west
towards Vancouver. The road ran through a pass called ‘Kicking
Horse Pass’ where the Canadian Pacific railway passes through via
the Spiral Tunnels, a figure-8 shaped bit of early 20th
century railway engineering wizardry designed to reduce the gradient
up the ‘Big Hill’.
Up an
adventurously narrow and twisty side road was yet another waterfall.
This one was called Takkakaw Falls and was the result of melting
glacier water flowing over a cliff. It’s a seasonal waterfall –
in winter the glacier doesn’t melt so the falls are dry. About a
sixth of the way from the top the water bounced off the cliff and
created a distinctive plume of white water. A bit further down the
water hit the cliff again and sprayed out in a haze. Again there were
no limits on climbing around on the rocks – you could get as wet as
you liked. We managed about half way to the ‘wet zone’ since
climbing up the boulders was easier than climbing back down again.
Wednesday 1st
We’d stayed in a quiet
town called Golden. The only sign of activity was in the railway
depot on the edge of town and the occasional car trundling past on
the street. It was quite a nice place. The constant stream of passing
tourists must make it cosmopolitan for a small mountain town. At the
next table along to ours the previous night had been some Australian
tourists talking about the ‘SnowCat’ rides (a bus with
caterpillar tracks that drives onto the Columbia icefield).
Two hours down the road
from Golden is another railway town called Revelstoke. We drove most
of the way along the scenic road up Mount Revelstoke. Near the top
the road was closed because of a stubbornly persisting snow bank.
There was supposedly a bear prowling around the car park at the top
too. There was a small railway museum in the town, and we stopped for
as look. There wasn’t much to it, just a steam engine, some
carriages and other bits and pieces. It was educational though, with
stuff about the railway’s construction and operation, the telegraph
system, the Canadian Pacific company’s other businesses (hotels and
planes mostly), and those perennially underappreciated people; the
Chinese labourers.
It was Canada day. The
centre of Revelstoke was closed with a parade marching around. By the
time we’d had lunch the parade had finished. The centre of the town
was adorned with maple leaf flags and various stalls with the usual
carnival fare – food and miniature flags. There were a few vintage
cars parked around. The sun was out and it was all rather pleasant.
A few
hours later when we’d made it back to Kamloops and stopped for a
break there was the other side of the coin; a very drunk native man
stumbling across the car park shouting about “Stolen lands” and
“Not being Canadian”. Unfortunately I happened to look vaguely in
his direction and was immediately accosted with a confrontational
“Are you arguing?” Fortunately I had a handy answer without
having to think; “I’m not Canadian either mate” which perhaps
sounded sincere enough to diffuse his addled brain and he shuffled
off to shout at the customers in a nearby Starbucks. Had it been late
at night in a big city centre I might have been a bit more on guard
to deal with an unruly drunk. 2pm in a car park was more of a
surprise, like being caught up in an armed robbery in a toy shop.
We’d booked rooms in
the newest Super 8 motel in Vancouver, and it wasn’t on the
directory map yet. All I had to navigate with were some directions
and the low sun was obscuring all the road signs. We made it despite
missing the motorway exit for the simple reason that the directions
only gave an exit number and the sign didn’t have an exit number.
Fortunately the Frasier River Bridge we went over twice didn’t have
a toll.
Thursday 2nd
In 2003 two of us visited
Vancouver for a day. That had been at the start of a road trip all
the way down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles. This time Vancouver
was the finish, nearly, and we’d all be going home soon. Sigh. The
trouble with really great journeys is that you end up in a sulk when
you can’t repeat them. The second time is never quite the
same, although if Vancouver keeps building new towers at the rate
they are doing then it could be a new city before long. Vancouver’s
also one of those places that’s so cosmopolitan, clean, spacious
and full of pretty people that I can’t help but be a bit jealous.
We took the SkyTrain from
Surrey into the city centre (and it is centre in Canada). We
walked around the waterfront pier and cruise ship terminal before
riding up to the top of the Harbour (and it is Harbour in
Canada) Centre tower. It looks like a conventional 1970s concrete
office block with a large burger bun plonked on the top. The ‘burger’
section is the observation level. When they built it the place
towered above central Vancouver but now it’s in danger of being
swamped by all the ranks of shiny new offices and groovy apartments
with trees on the roof. Vancouver looks a bit like a party for tower
blocks. They’re all look the same are clustered together in little
crowds.
We walked to Stanley
Park, down a high street that could’ve been lifted from London.
Most of the tourist maps use perspective to hide how big the park is,
ie; very. It’s almost the same size as the city centre and its main
attraction is an aquarium. We were aware that the aquarium was aimed
squarely at children so we weren’t sure whether to bother. We
didn’t. It was expensive, crowded and mostly indoors. We had a
drink and got some free wildlife entertainment from an inquisitive
seagull.
One thing that’s
striking in Vancouver is how Chinese it is. On the SkyTrain, in the
shopping centres, on the bus, in the park. Chances are there will be
Chinese people or food or adverts. Naturally there’s also a
Chinatown. It’s just to the east of the centre and the gentrified
low rise Gastown district. Tucked in behind one of those ugly
concrete two level shopping ‘plaza’ things was a proper Chinese
garden, with water lilies and fish lurking in the ponds. It may have
been small but they were more pleasant place to be than the Butchart
Gardens, which may have been well kept but were a bit sterile in
places.
In 2010 the Winter
Olympics come to Vancouver, and most of the area around the end of
the city’s central inlet harbour is being turned into the Olympic
village. The only building there now is Science World, another one of
Vancouver’s attractions that’s aimed at families with children.
Perhaps they have a deal with the Royal B.C. Museum not to provide
any museums for grown-ups in Vancouver so people make the trip to
Victoria. When we got there it was still open but the IMAX screen had
finished showing anything interesting for the day. It was late in the
afternoon. We caught the SkyTrain back to the park and ride at
Surrey, drove to the ferry terminal and went back to Victoria.
Friday
3rd (last day in Victoria)
In the evening three of us
rode the Victoria Clipper (a smallish catamaran) to Seattle and took
a taxi to Sea-Tac airport. Before that we’d looked round the
Maritime Museum, in the old courthouse in the centre of town. The
ground floor had exhibits on explorers, traders, pirates and
everything else that happened in the area when ships had sails. Up on
the second floor were cases of ship builder’s models and an very
comprehensive history of BC Ferries. There was also an exhibit on the
Vikings with TV playing a forty minute show about the discovery of
Greenland and Newfoundland. At the top of the building was a
preserved courtroom.
Saturday 4th
The Fourth of July on a
Saturday and Seattle was very quiet. We took a bus into town and had
a look around. Most of the cars on the streets were taxis, and most
of the pedestrians looked like tourists. We had a look at the new
central library, which was closed for the holiday, then walked down
to the monorail to ride down to Seattle Center (back to the American
spelling) and the Space Needle. The monorail only has two stations,
one of which sits outside the second floor of the Westlake Shopping
Center downtown, and is barely a mile long. It was built as a novelty
to get people to the Space Needle during the 1962 World’s Fair and
never demolished or extended. Instead of building more monorail
Seattle has built a mile and a half of ‘Transit Tunnel’ under the
city centre. This was a feature of the city I had never heard of
until the bus drove into it.
It was a hot day by
Seattle’s normal standards – nudging the 30 degree mark. Up on
the Space Needle the view was clear enough to see Mount Rainier in
the distance. It was quite crowded at the top the tower. Since it was
built in 1962 the Space Needle wasn’t built to be wheelchair
accessible so its outside viewing area is reached by stairs and
normal sized doors, so a little patience is in order. Since it was
Independence Day somebody had asked two of the staff to dress up as
Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty. ‘Uncle Sam’ looked a little
young to have a grey beard and young Lady Liberty was worryingly sexy
swishing around in her green drapes and crown.
Squatting underneath the
Space Needle is the purple, silver and blue blob of the Experience
Music Project (or ‘EMP’), built as Seattle’s tribute to Jimi
Hendrix, the city’s most famous export after the Boeing 747,
Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee, by the billionaire Paul
Allen, aka other person from Microsoft. Frank Gehry, who also did the
Guggenheim in Bilbao, did the architecture, and it’s very
interesting, looking like a bit like a smashed electric guitar from
above with an appropriate ‘Purple Haze’ finishing. Since I’d
last been here in 2003 they’d built a new bit called the Science
Fiction Museum, making the full acronym of the building ‘EMP/SFM’.
The EMP bit hadn’t changed much, with a floor of exhibits, a floor
of the usual ‘interactive’ things, and a giant tower built from
guitars. One of Michael Jackson’s sparkly jackets was on display in
the entrance as a hastily assembled tribute. The ‘SFM’ was new to
me and apart from the theoretical ban on taking photos (that many
people were flouting) it was very good. There were many first
editions of books, and props from TV shows and films. On the ground
floor was an exhibition of Jim Henson’s puppetry (Muppets, Ninja
Turtles, Sesame Street etc). Not exactly ‘Science Fiction’ but it
was a temporary travelling exhibition.
Seattle sells a single
$50 ticket that is advertised as being for all their major
attractions. This is almost true, except that you have to choose
between the EMP and the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Since we
wanted to go to both, that was a little annoying. We walked to the
Seattle Aquarium on the waterfront, near where the Victoria Clipper
had docked the evening before. It was divided into two parts; the
original bit, a 1970s construction, and a newer section, ironically
built in a restored older warehouse. Half of the new bit was an open
pond contained various starfish and sea urchins that could be
touched. I could imagine any Australians present balking at touching
anything with colourful tentacles despite the assurances that they
were harmless. The older section was built as both an aquarium and a
large salmon hatchery. It was made from concrete and was horribly
ugly. Since the sun was shining and the place was clean and well kept
it was possible to look past the weathered concrete and enjoy it.
There were some sea otters and seals pratting about in their usual
style, although it wasn’t salmon spawning season so the concrete
salmon steps were empty.
The waterfront in Seattle
is about forty metres below the rest of the city behind it. Hanging
over the edge of the steep hill is the famous Pike Place Market. We
walked up there and had a look around. Since it was 5pm the
fishmongers were packing up and going home but there were still
stalls open and people milling around. After a bit of fruitless
wandering around we eventually found a restaurant that was open, a
‘Chinese Bistro’, which meant that some of the menu could be
eaten with chopsticks if you wanted. We actually sat in the bar
section and had the bar menu since the main restaurant floor was full
with a forty minute wait. The bar menu was perfectly acceptable
really, and the forty minute wait only seemed worth it if you had
children and couldn’t sit in the bar section.
A
pleasant day was slightly spoiled by two slightly drunk ‘homeboy’
types on the bus back to the hotel. They weren’t aggressive, just
very loud, and sat several rows apart SHOUTING! to each other.
One was talking in great detail, in the way drunks do, about what
he’d been eating, and got the other started about how his “uncle
in Hawaii” cooked, which led to how “my man” Barack Obama is
from Hawaii, and eventually how “they killed Michael” (Jackson).
Thankfully they didn’t ride all the way to SeaTac and the last
twenty minutes were relatively quiet. It was a little sad to see such
an unfortunate case of stereotyped racial roles being played out on
the bus. The older and whiter people had sat as far forward as
possible away from the potentially unruly young black men and their
choice been proven to be a prudent one.
Sunday 5th
In the morning we caught
another bus to the Museum of Flight, which is halfway between SeaTac
and downtown Seattle. The museum is adjacent to Boeing Field,
Seattle’s original airport. It was built in 1928 and was the place
where Boeing made planes before moving north to the current factory
in Everett. The original ‘Red Barn’ workshop is still there as
part of the museum and contains an exhibition about the early years
of the company, including a mock-up of a 1918 Boeing ‘Model C’ as
it would have looked being built (a large wooden frame with wires),
and a Second World War design office.
The
main building was four floors tall and had the standard arrangement
of planes hanging from the roof and arranged on the floor. The museum
isn’t only ‘The Boeing Museum’ so they had all sorts of stuff;
Ford TriMotor, SR71 Blackbird, MiGs, Cessnas etc. There was a replica
of the Blackbird’s cockpit you could climb inside. It was
surprisingly easy to get in, and not as small as I’d expected, but
it was a bit of a struggle to get out again with any dignity. There
were some 1920s air mail planes arranged to look like they were being
loaded up. I particularly liked the mail van bearing the promotional
message ‘Air Mail Is Socially Correct’. Down on the ground floor
was a gallery about Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad, who had donated his
memorabilia to the museum. He became an astronaut despite having a
penchant for doing things like sticking cartoons and a picture of a
nude pinup girl in the Apollo 12 moon walk task list. There was a
copy of the task list on display, and funnily enough it didn’t
contain all of the original pages…
Up on
the third floor was a room with a view of the airport called ‘The
Tower’. This was a new exhibition about how air traffic control
works. Basically, a different person does each bit. So there’s
ground control, ramp control, taxi control, approach control, and
area control. Once in the air, the display said, the pilot’s
workload decreases ‘dramatically’. A monitor showed all the
current movements in the Seattle area and in the whole country and
played the current ATC chatter. I quickly understood why controllers
work short shifts. The area map didn’t look all that crowded, but
the planes were travelling across it quickly. There’s no ‘hang on
I’ll be back in two minutes’ in an airport control tower.
A
separate gallery had a comprehensive array of WWI and WWII fighter
planes, including the first ever fighter plane (an Italian Caproni
Ca20 from 1914). There were some slightly unconvincing British
accents in the recreated WWI RAF briefing room – they really should
put in a TV showing Blackadder Goes Forth instead, it’d be
more true-to-life (“I say sir, you mean it’s finally time to give
Harry Hun a good old British-style thrashing, six of the best,
trousers down? … You mean ‘Are we all going to get killed?’
Yes.” If I were museum curator I don’t think I could resist
putting a picture of Biggles Is Extremely Silly (by M.
Python, 1970) somewhere in the displays.
Over
the, on their shiny new footbridge, is the Air Park, which has quite
the selection of big stuff. There’s a Concorde (“The only one on
the West Coast!”), an Air Force One 707, a 727, the first 737, and
the first 747. The Concorde and Air Force One were open to look
inside but only a few people at a time, a contrast to museums in
Britain where they don’t care how many people crowd on. So there
was a bit of a queue. Fling into Chicago I had seen a big blue 747 in
a separate area on the ground, and had suspected it was the
Presidents plane (what else would it be?), and the evening news
confirmed that the President was ‘back in Chicago’.
In a
supreme piece of timing a bus we thought had passed turned up a few
minutes late as we were walking back across the bridge. We rode back
into the city and, after a bit of consulting timetables and
passersby, worked out which bus went to the city zoo. It was due in
about ten minutes. This was good since I really needed the toilet and
there was no way I was sitting still on a bus for quarter of an hour.
The bus stop was next to a big Macy’s department store; I checked
the floor directory… men’s restroom is on the… FIFTH floor!
Eight minutes! I’ve rarely walked so fast through a
department store before.
Seattle’s zoo is a
nightmare to navigate around. Its paths loop around and dump you out
in a totally different bit. Each junction has a multiplicity of
choices. It’s quite easy to do what we did, and be led around most
of it without ever getting to one of the corners. Still, most of the
wildlife seemed to be making the most of the un-Seattle like warm
weather. The orangutan was lolloping around, the lion was prowling
around, and the bears were asleep. One of the enclosures was empty
because, ironically enough, a wild bald eagle had made a nest in the
tree. The Komodo Dragon in the reptile house was busy exciting the
nearby children who were managing somehow to say things like ‘I’m
like, a foot from, like, a Komodo, like, Dragon’ with absolute
sincerity but without actually sounding excited. It was, like,
sarcastic without the sarcasm.
That’s about it. We
didn’t miss either of our two flights on Tuesday. Nobody had to sit
next to a baby. No thunderstorms kept us on the ground for five hours
this year. There was even free cake in the departure lounge at
Seattle, as somebody on our flight had won a trip to Paris to see the
Opera, or something.
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