Seattle to Whistler to Kamloops

We had a slow day in Seattle. Kate needed to talk to some of her medical people (Everything is fine, no worries.) and we needed to do laundry, so that passed most of the day. Our friend Chris and his partner Damon had us over to their place for an excellent dinner and we had lots of chat and story-telling. It was a really fun evening. Mark joined us, as well.

The next morning, we left the Camlin, a Worldmark resort in downtown Seattle. The building is almost 100 years old (It opened in 1926,) and like any well-ordered old hotel is rumored to be haunted. We didn't seen any spooks, but that might have been because it was too damned hot for anyone wearing a sheet. We were told repeatedly, "You don't need air conditioning in Seattle." I'm here to tell you that, sometimes, you do, you do.

There is a grand old theater across the street, the Paramount. It's pretty gingerbready too.

Now, I know I'm an old white guy, rather conservative, and from a small town, but there were lots of folks in Seattle that just left me shaking my head. We didn't get to photograph many of them, but the following photograph of two women in long blue dresses, each woman carrying a cross, might give you a sense of what I'm speaking of. You can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

The number of freaky people we saw seemed to me to exceed the proportions of such that we've seen in other major cities. A couple of times I recalled the words of an old song that expressed what I though as I looked at them:

 I been to Georgia on a fast train, Honey,

I wasn’t born no yesterday.

I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education,

Ain’t no need in y’all treatin’ me this a'way.

But we survived Seattle, and really enjoyed seeing our friends there. Damon overhauled Kate's cranky antique IPad and made it jump and shout. Thanks, Damon.

We got out of Seattle around 10 AM, and headed north.

The traffic was heavy every foot of the way (It took an hour to get across the border into Canada) until we passed Whistler by 30 miles or so and reached our destination of The Hitching Post (a popular western appellation...remember the cafe several days ago......somewhere in Montana, I think.) Motel in Mr. Currie.

That's where the traffic and people fell off to such an extent that we had no way to order takeout, nor was there a place to buy anything to eat without a drive further than we wanted to face. So I ate an MRE, and Kate claimed that popcorn and M&M's made a better dinner than that.

The next morning, we had to drive for a couple of hours to get to a place to get something to eat, and we had a very nice brunch in some little town in the mountains between Whistler and Kamloops. We gassed up the car at $1.49 Canadian per liter......Kate did the math, and says that works out to about $5.40 per gallon. But it beat walking.

More mountains, more rivers, more lakes. The scenery up here is just marvelous.

We got into Kamloops about 2 PM. Kamloops was founded as a fur trading post in 1811, and is now the largest city (85K people in 2011) for hundreds of miles in any direction. It appears to be a modern city with all the trimmings. If you want more info, it's here: Kamloops

We're looking forward to a nice dinner at the nearby Chinese restaurant. There are surprising numbers of folks of Asian ancestry all along the west coast of North America, and there are really lots of them in British Columbia.

TBT Day 16

Stay tuned.............