Leaving Tofino, the sun is out in full force,typical for a day we have to spend in the car. We stop at Combers Beach for a quick snap or two and wish we could stay longer – this is the southern part of Long Beach, 12 km from end to end. Watching the waves roll in, I imagine the Pacific Ocean as a gigantic bowl of water, the earth’s rotation sloshing the sea from one continental coastline to the other.
We visit my aunt and uncle – she my mother’s siter, he my father’s brother, both in their 80s and determined to stay in their neat-as-a-pin house for as long as they can. I catch them up on the latest from the relatives we’ve visited so far – my FB still having me believe that he isn’t yet fed up with the endless re-broadcasting of family news.
Down the Island highway to Victoria and nearly out of gas. My gut tells me I’ve been in this situation before – running on empty in a German car. Oh right, it’s that Boxing Day fiasco on the road to Banff. Read about it here,.
Maggie of Stepping Out With Red Shoes On picked up on the label on the previous post and wanted to know what ‘learning to be a better passenger’ was all about. That’s a whole other post in itself, but it refers to my anxiety when not behind the wheel, especially in my own car and in my own country, More on that later.
These are not boats. These are high-end housing projects that happen to float.
Pulling into the ferry line-up at Victoria Harbour, the US Border Patrol requests the presence of MFB at the customs office. He’s gone for a long time and I imagine him being overly helpful and giving them way more information than they need. As in, how many bottle of wine we/;ve got stashed in the back of the car and the provenance of all that jewellery that used to be my mother’s. Going into the States makes me slightly queasy, and I won’t be completely sorry if MFB is refused entry.
But he’s not. He’s passed the preliminary inspection and will go through a more rigorous one once we make land on Bainbridge Island. I’ve heard lots of stories about cars torn apart by zealous agents, and owners left to deal with the aftermath. Do I have any illegal downloads on my hard drive? And why am I writing about this on the ferry – incriminating words right here for official eyes to find?
Tiny floating houses with tiny floating taxi. Victoria inner harbour.
We board the ferry and get some cafeteria food. MFB, surprisingly, orders nachos, and I, even less characteristically opt for clam chowder with chilli on the side. Here are his nachos a l’orange plastique.
I can’t believe he’s going to eat them, and force him to take some of my chilli/chowder. With as many varieties of cheese in the world as there are, it astounds me that my neighbours to the south had to invent their own to melt over corn chips. American cheese is as much a misnomer as Canadian Cheddar.
Nearing Port Angeles, I finally have a close-up view of the mountains of the Olympic peninsula, after years of peering at them from the Canadian side through the haze of the Juan de Fuca straits. We have an hour-long drive to a little town across the water from Seattle, and if we can get through US Customs without a hitch, we’ll be in a king-sized bed before midnight. After two nights in a bed that was a double by aspiration only, I’m looking forward to some room to stretch out.
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