Sometimes you’ve just got to get away and get into new surroundings, if even for a day. This past weekend presented itself with just the opportunity, as my husband and I opted for a lazy Sunday drive down to the States.
We started out with a horrendous border wait, complicated by my husband’s lack of either an American or Canadian passport. For anyone who’s travelled by car down to the US without either of these, it involves an extra step of heading inside the immigration office and waiting in yet another queue to process a 90 day entry visa.
We’ve gone though this each and every time on car trips to the States. If not for the fact that the Dutch government won’t allow dual citizenship, we’d apply for Canadian passports and get a Nexxus pass. It’s too bad that my American passport does little to expedite poor hubby’s travel time across the border.
Once we finally made it across, checking out the tiny harbour town of Blaine was next on the agenda.
We’d only heard of this town and like many, think to ourselves, “One day, we’ll check it out, on the way down to Seattle”. After a short tour of the town’s only main street, we drove along quiet inner roads to Birch Bay. The mussel and oyster season is in full swing, and we found several families digging up edible treasures along the water’s edge.
We stopped for a while in Bellingham, taking in the heart of the old town, its architecture and a lunch stop at Chuckanut Brewery.
The town’s architecture is reminiscent of Olympia, another Western Washington university town. A couple of Americanos later and we were off to Mt. Vernon, via the gorgeous off-highway Chuckanut Drive.
We stopped mid-way to photograph the San Juan Islands with a clear day’s view leading to the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
Mt. Vernon on a late Sunday afternoon wasn’t exactly hopping. We got there too late to take in any of the shops, so we made our way back towards Canada. With a wait time of over an hour to cross the border, we decided on dinner in Blaine, having familiarized ourselves with the town’s (one street!) layout. The line-up at the border hadn’t grown any shorter by then, but at least we weren’t starving AND waiting for over an hour in the car at 9 in the evening.
We listened to the Canucks vs. Kings game on 1040 Radio and gave one another a huge high-five when Alex Burrows scored an empty-netter goal to drive the final nail into the coffin for the Kings, winning both the game AND first round for us 4-2.