A day to prepare for departure

 We spent the night in Wenatchee, WA., then, early this morning, started west along US Highway 2 toward Everett, WA. It was a beautiful drive with low hanging clouds offering only a hint of the mountains around us.

Our destination was Vancouver, a bustling, beautiful metropolis of about 662,000 people. Of course, that’s counting in the metric system so no one knows how many people actually live there.

When highway 2 basically ended in Everett, we headed north on The Five (that’s I-5 for the non-Californians in the audience.) We soon found ourselves at the tail end of a line of cars crossing into Canada. 

Luckily, we were north-bound, as the wait was “only” about 35 minutes. Had we been traveling south INTO the US, the wait would have been at least twice that long.

As soon as we pulled away from the border guard station I accelerated and glanced at the map on the screen of my car. It told me what the speed limit was - 37 mph, which struck me as funny. The displayed speed limit soon jumped to 62 mph, which was when I realized that the GPS was doing the metric conversion for me. 

A couple of river crossings later we found ourselves driving through construction zone after construction zone. There is a lot of building going on in this town. In places they appear to be demolishing entire neighborhoods, replacing them with cute, yet densely packed, houses of vertical structure with adjoining units holding each other up. The entire block was one continuous row of front doors, it seemed.

Another thing we found to be quite different was the lights controlling the intersections. There were no blinking yellow lights allowing a cautious left turn in heavy traffic. Perhaps knowing that people would ignore such signs, the green lights would blink instead. And instead of using left turn lanes, they have cars stopping in the “high speed” middle lanes, blocking all traffic while they wait for a break in traffic which will not come until the light turns red. This effectively reduces all four-lane roads to two lanes, until such time that someone decides to turn right. If traffic, either auto or pedestrian, will not allow an unobstructed right turn, the four lanes become zero lanes, with turning vehicles successfully bringing all traffic to a halt.

We found the hotel with little trouble and turned into the entrance of the parking garage where we were instantly made aware that the entry and exit lanes were opposite their normal positions, as if we had suddenly been transported to Great Britain. No explanation was found for this, and after going around the first turn in the garage we were instructed to occupy the right lane again! I thought I must have misinterpreted the arrows and signs but later, when shuttling vehicles to our long-term parking sight, I found the same indications while exiting.

Traffic patterns notwithstanding, the hotel and its surroundings are wonderful.

We are on the 15th floor of the building on the left, a Sheraton Hotel.

We met our friends, Scott and Bev in the hotel. They had arrived shortly before we had and, soon after we settled into our adjoining rooms, Scott and I decided we would take our two vehicles to the aforementioned longterm parking. That turned into an adventure in itself, the details of which involved more explanation than can be spelled out here. Besides, that story paled in comparison to the adventure they had earlier this morning on the south side of Seattle. They became the victim of a road rage incident, where someone apparently thought they were cut off in the high speed lane. The guy swerved into the left hand emergency lane, accelerated quickly to get along side of them, then deliberately made a hard right turn into the side of their vehicle, damaging the entire driver’s side. Scott instinctively swerved right to lesson the impact, but then corrected back to the left, again making contact with the other car, which accelerated and drove away.

We are all safe and preparing for a 7 am departure to the train depot where we will be placed on the Rocky Mountaineer for the first of nine days traveling.  

More to come!