Make a Run for the Border!

After posting the Seattle pictures, I thought it might be nice to put up a gallery of our pictures following that last US stop. Take your mind back to mid-November 2007, as our heroes prepare to cross into Canada ...

The drive up from Seattle to Bellingham was insanely pleasant -- strangely green scenery, mild temperatures, lovely mountains in the distance most of the time. We stopped at a Costco for one last cheap US fillup -- as I've mentioned previously, gas prices are about a buck a gallon higher in western Canada -- before heading to Abbotsford where we decided to cross (we could have used Peace Arch, but we were advised it was a lot busier a station).


The Huntington border station in Abbotsford turned out to be plenty busy on its own, but this might be just a coincidence of timing -- it was a Wednesday right around dinnertime, the day before Thanksgiving (remember this, it's important!). We were confident that we had all our papers/passports/etc in order and we hoped that the crossing would only take a few minutes -- maybe an hour since we were declaring our intention to live in Canada.

Well, we certainly had most of papers in order -- we had forgotten just one tiny detail. The van. And everything in it.

We detailed this in a previous post, but basically we were there almost four hours, getting approvals, inventorying (from memory!!) everything we own (both what we brought in the van and what we intend to bring up from storage at some point), and reviewing our histories with Canadian authorities. We finally rolled into Vancouver and our trusty Richmond Hampton Inn (another hug for Tristan!) pretty late, and Richmond doesn't have a lot of late-night restaurants (but luckily we found a pretty cool one at the nearby Best Western).

So we had a couple of days in Vancouver before we set sail for our new hometown ... but those pics will have to wait until next time (soon!).