Wednesday 3 September 2014

So, Canada...

Back on the road again, then - well, the sea first. We'd recharged quite successfully in our little Seattle studio, and it was time to catch a ferry to Canada. We'd found it was easier (and cheaper) to rent a car on Vancouver Island and start our circular route there instead of Vancouver itself - also we'd just had a dose of city life and it was time for some wilderness again.

Not that Victoria, a lovely little seaside city, was anything but civilised. This was my first time in Canada, and it immediately felt comfortable - hardly a new observation but it felt like America filtered through a British prism. We got to see quite a lot of Victoria, on foot, carrying all our bags, as I'd slightly misjudged the scale of the walk from the ferry terminal to our hotel! Given that this was my biggest logistical faux pas so far, Kate wisely cut me some slack. We'd decided to spend time here when we got back after our loop into the wilds, so we didn't hang around - the next morning I went to pick up our hire car and was pleasantly surprised to be offered a luxury-trim Ford Fusion rather than the relatively dinky Hyundai we'd requested. However, it felt like a boat compared to the nimble little Elantra, and it took quite a while before either of us was confident about where the corners were... the fancy motorised seats, reversing camera & built-in everything we got used to pretty quickly though!

We drove up the island, veering west to the wild coast at Ucluelet, spotting our first bear (black) eating grass by the side of the road. It was very 'cool' there - surfing and general outdoorsing is a big thing, and we walked among the huge trees and on the foggy beaches, then back to the east coast and the extremely pleasant, though remote communities up to Port Hardy, where we were getting a much bigger ferry, for a much longer journey. Vancouver Island seemed like a lovely place but most of it is a long way from everywhere - something it apparently shares with New Zealand, which it resembles quite a lot in places, it would appear.

The ferry from Port Hardy cruised up what is known as, no sniggering at the back please, the Inside Passage - a long chain of channels running parallel to the coast but protected from the weather. It takes all day to get to Prince Rupert further up the coast, with a very early start in the dark. We'd splashed out on seats in the posh bit of the ferry, hoping for peace and quiet. This was not to be - a group of bikers occupied the entire front row and began yelling and laughing from the start, displaying that charming American habit of acting like they were the only people in the room and they didn't have to give consideration to anyone else. By the end of the day, around 10pm when everyone was desperate to sleep (including plenty of families with children) they got back from a movie or something and were continuing to make a racket, even starting singing songs, enough to make even mild-mannered me get up and tell them to shut the hell up. I think I embarrassed them quite successfully - they did shut up, mostly.

One thing to bear in mind - they may have been bikers but they weren't exactly Hell's Angels... they were the baby-boomer type, all around 60 years old. You'd think they would have known better. Maybe being on the bike all day damages your hearing so much you forget you don't have to talk really loud all the time.

The other disappointment of that trip was the weather - it was very cloudy all day, foggy at times, so we couldn't see a great deal of the beautiful scenery. The bad weather continued in Prince Rupert, and after our tiring day on the ferry we got up, looked outside, and went back to bed, taking another much-needed day off.

From Prince Rupert we only had one way to go - the road struck off east into the mainland, so we followed. We got to one turnoff that had us only 240km from Alaska, but we resisted that temptation (not least because there was nothing much actually there to see in Alaska if we'd gone that way) and continued towards Prince George. Aside from the royalty theme, we discovered a bit of Simpsons connection too, from Port Simpson just up the coast, through Smithers, where we stopped (pronouncing it with a Mr. Burns accent, naturally) and then Moe Road and Burns Lake a little later. Didn't spot anyone with yellow skin though. The towns along this road were surprisingly substantial and well kept - we'd expected them to be a bit one-horse.

After Prince George came the Canadian Rockies - we'd planned to stop in Jasper (or at least nearby - it was very expensive to stay there) and walk in the mountains, but weather was terrible and we only visited the town for lunch. Since we hadn't booked all the rest of our Canada loop we figured we could come back on the return leg and see it in better weather.

Instead we drove east out of BC and into Alberta, to visit Edmonton. It's not somewhere I'd rush back to... we went to the famous (famous in Canada, that is) mall, and found it to be, well, a really big mall, filled with lots of people. The takeout food we got delivered to our hotel was also a strong candidate for the worst meal of the trip - all in all, pretty dismal.

The next day we had great weather as we drove out to the small town of Bruce where they were having their annual Stampede, aka rodeo. The idea of a herd of stampeding Australian men all called Bruce was a pleasing one, though. The rodeo had an interesting Canadian flavour, including a performance from the remarkably well-trained Mountie display team, but the hot weather and the long, long list of events meant the crowd's energy died after lunch and we ended up bailing before the end. Turns out 2 and a half rodeos is about as much as I can take. Also they had wire fencing round the arena instead of rails, so I couldn't get clear photos... but then I have a lot of rodeo photos now and they all do start to look kinda the same...

After that we drove south to Calgary across the rather featureless Alberta plains, and I took the car the next day to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum out in Drumheller - a seriously awesome dinosaur museum. It had the distinct advantage of being a long way from anywhere so the people who went there really wanted to go, and thus it wasn't filled with bored, unappreciative kids. I may have mentioned my feelings on children in museums before. I know I was one, once. I'm pretty sure I was attentive though!

We couldn't summon the energy to poke around Calgary (plus the parking was super expensive) so we headed straight back to the mountains, to Banff this time. Lovely town, very hot in the summer, also has ludicrously expensive accommodation. The only place we could find that was reasonable was a hostel. As hostels go, it was really rather good - but we're so over hostels now. It's not too much to ask for aircon when it's in the mid-thirties centigrade... Funnily enough we shared with lads (including heavy drinking travellers and stag-do attendees) and with girls - and we were both agreed we'd share with the lads again every time. The girls were noisy, they took ages to get ready, hogged the bathroom... who knew?

Fortunately with the good weather we were able to get some exploring done - we went for a fab hike up through forests into alpine meadows filled with beautiful flowers and with great views. I'd bought bear spray in case we encountered any residents but only ended up killing a ground squirrel when it literally dashed under my boot as I walked past. Oops. Add that to the couple of prairie dogs I'd run over in Montana, the porcupine I shot in Wyoming (at least that one was deliberate)...

We also visited Lake Louise, which was very pretty, though thronged with tourists as it was a Canadian holiday weekend. We took a chairlift up the nearby mountain and nearly saw a grizzly bear that was roaming around the tourist area at the top - frustratingly close but we had to stay back. Just as we were leaving, people coming off the chairlift told us the bear was visible further down, and so it was - and luckily for it, there was no way for me to accidentally kill it. We also saw coyotes, elk and bighorn sheep on the way back - quite a day for wildlife spotting!

After all that we drove north, back up to Jasper, along the famous Icefields Parkway - spotting another black bear and cub, eating berries by the side of the road, with a crowd of tourists out of their car and taking pictures only metres away. I confess I did get closer than I should have, but then I had bear spray in my hand, and I wasn't encouraging children to get a good close look too.

On the way towards Vancouver we did what neither of us had done before - left a restaurant having ordered but without being served, after waiting for too long for not much. There seemed to be some kind of feud going on between the server and the chef, but we didn't stick around to find out what it was!

We then stayed in a glorious little B&B in Vernon in the Okanagan for a few days, remembering what it was like to live in a civilised manner, before we hit the big city of Vancouver itself. I did some of the most intense driving I've done trying to get there on time to meet our next Airbnb host - a lot of high-speed miles in some fairly busy traffic, and then trying to fight our way through rush-hour congestion in the city centre.

We were pretty late, but our host had waited for us - he was a nice guy, though his apartment was a bit shabby. The location was amazing - a really lovely bit of Vancouver, right on the edge of huge, beautiful Stanley Park and with the sea just minutes away - but the apartment was altogether a bit 'student', the crowning disappointment being the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor with ill-fitting linen! After a lot of really nice motel beds, this wasn't a good thing... but we made the most of it, got some groceries and had home cooking again, and did a little light exploration of the area. Vancouver's well known as a great place to live - we can see why.

After a couple or three days there we got the car ferry back to Vancouver Island. This crossing was lovely and sunny, the island looked beautiful and we found a great little pizza place in a charming little seaside town called Sidney, where jazzmen entertained us with live music in the streets as we ate. It was all very nice indeed. As we sat, I idly checked my phone and realised we were supposed to return the car in half an hour. My second logistical error of the trip - I'd thought we had an extra day.

Fortunately Victoria wasn't far, and Enterprise were totally OK with us requesting an extra day - in fact we'd had until the next morning anyway. So we drove on to our hotel, had a lovely meal, and went to bed - only to find there was noise like a loud TV coming from somewhere... yet it wasn't next door, or upstairs, and there were no rooms downstairs... only there was a nightclub, running a comedy night! Genius bit of planning there, having a noisy late-night business under the rooms where people are paying to sleep...

The next day we drove out to a coastal park to go for a walk, and a talk... which continued as we went back to Sidney for lunch again, and walked along the pier, talking some more. There'll be another blog post just after this one to explain what we talked about, and decided...

Soon we were packing up to leave Canada, dropping the car off and heading back to the ferry terminal in Victoria. The sailing back to Seattle was not at all as pleasant as the outbound trip - it was full, noisy and seemed to take much longer - though that could have been down to our seating partners who kept up an inane chatter the whole journey (have you gathered by now that we like people to be quiet around us?). We arrived in Seattle under the full (super) moon, and that was that for Canada. Kate had been several times before, but it was my first time - we both really like it, though we both felt we were too worn down from travelling so much to really appreciate it. And that's what the next blog post is about...

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