This message comes to you from a hotel room in Vancouver Canada, the next stop on Vic and Rog’s world tour of 2006! I had a great time in Seattle — catching up with folks from past SHAREs, and meeting a few mailing-list-buddies for the first time (my work blog and wiki page will be getting more of the technical detail). Seattle is a nice place to visit: I’d certainly like to find a way to get back in the future. The drive up from Seattle to Vancouver was pretty uneventful (except for the missed turnoff to the Boeing plant, my bad).
It took about three hours from Boeing to the Vancouver outskirts, which is pretty much right-on what I’d researched it would take (we were trying to get back onto the I-5 just after 4pm, along with a heap of other traffic, which held us up for a while… but after Everett it freed up quite well). The three hours actually included a brief detour to Bellingham Airport (to the Hertz location, to collect a map) which probably cost us at least 15 minutes of road time, so I think we did really well.
Crossing the US-Canada border was really easy. There were not that many cars there, and we queued for about 5 minutes. I think the lady in the booth was a bit surprised to see a couple of Aussies in the car (our hire car has British Columbia plates, so she was probably expecting re-entering Canadians). After the standard questions and a few odd ones (“are you taking the car back to the airport?”), she directed us to park and go into the customs and immigration off ice to have our passports stamped. A couple more questions and we were good to go, with Immigration Canada stamped in our little books! 🙂
Now I have the joy of driving an American car, with speedo marked in MPH and miles, in a metric land… %-)
Crossed Wires 