Weekend diary

A recap of our weekend ...

• We left as soon as I was done work Thursday for Hinton, where we were staying overnight. The trip got off to an auspicous start as our hotel had lost our reservation. Now, this wasn't one of those things where we made our reservations online or something. My wife had called the hotel and spoke to a, you know, hotel employee and made our reservations that way. Despite that, there was nothing in the system. Good thing they had lots of empty rooms that night.


• Friday's drive through the mountains was largely uneventful, except for some blizzard-like conditions near Blue River, and some dodgy weather on the Coquihalla Highway. I love driving through the mountains - so beautiful and majestic.


• The border. ARGH! THE BORDER! We had a two hour and twenty minute wait at the border in Sumas, which is by far the longest I've ever had to wait for any kind of border crossing. My younger daughter passed the time by watching an entire movie on our little DVD player. When we finally did make it to the checkpoint, the border guard told us we were a part of history: Sumas had the longest waits of any land crossing between Canada and the U.S. on Good Friday. Lucky us. I expect the certificate in the mail.


• Sadly, our border experience was just the beginning of the delays, as I5 was brutally backed up by traffic. It took us more than four hours to get to Tacoma from the border because of the congestion. We used some of that time to play with the radio and found every Christian music station we could.


• As expected, Washington state is green and lush and spring is already in full bloom. My lungs were quickly spoiled by the humidity and freshness.


• One of the weekend highlights was seeing some deer run through the yards near my grandfather's house.





• There was a heron out drying its wings on the dock next to his place.
  
  
  
  And we saw a bald eagle dive-bombing the lake to get fish. Or, perhaps, ducks. He didn't seem to discriminate in what he was wanting to eat.


• In short, our time in Tacoma was great. Good food, lots of family, no complaints. As a bonus, I stocked up on Diet Mountain Dew and the Caramel Pepsi Jazz, neither of which are available in Canada.
  


• The return trip was plagued by the same kind of delays as the trip down. We left Tacoma Sunday night and drove to Hope, which went fine. (And the wait at the border to get back into Canada was a far more reasonable 20 minutes.) But our planned return on the Coquihalla Highway was kiboshed by a Mountie at a Hope gas station at 6 a.m., who warned us against it and told us to take Highway 1 instead. That was not the most fun drive I've ever done, particularly because it was snowing a lot for the first 30 minutes or so of the windy drive on a narrow highway, but we made it home in one piece.


• The video below is my wife playing with my aunt's snake - or, should I say, one of her snakes. The video stars Redrica, her boa. The mere fact this video exists is a testament to my wife's willingness to make a good movie despite her great unease around snakes (Actually, she wanted a kick-butt Facebook profile photo of her with the snake. The video was a bonus). The final clip guest stars my younger daughter, Michelle.