Sam And Saundra's Year Long Adventure - Part 177

Sam And Saundra’s Year Long Adventure – Part 177

Canada to USA

8/27/09  – Abbotsford/Sumas Border Crossing

We have an uneventful morning and pack up and head back to Hope.  Trailer intact.  We are confident that Brutus and Brutilla are up to the task of getting us out of Canada and back into the United States without further problems.  We wave at Hope as we pass and enter the traffic headed towards Vancouver, BC.  We talk about taking a summer and traveling around the Vancouver, BC area onto Vancouver Island.  So much we want to see in Canada and it vies with all we have already seen and want to see again. Such hard decisions. Such anticipated decisions. We travel through Chilliwack.  This area looks so much like home.  We follow the signs and soon we are traveling through Abbotsford, and stop for a very short re-entry conversation.  Through Sumas and we are in Washington. 

Beautiful Even Close To The Border

We follow a country road to I-5, then take off at a dashing 55 miles per hour. We know that we can do this.  Our next issue is where to stay.  Sam and I are both native Oregonians.  Snooty sort.  Maybe not snooty. Maybe we have had really good blinders on for non-Oregon beauty.  Sam was born and raised in Portland and I was born and at least partially raised, in Ontario.  We both previously made no effort to know anything about Washington State, except for very isolated parts of Port Angeles, Spokane and Yakima, and that was only because relatives lived there.  We must have gotten there with Scotties help, as we paid no attention to anything.  Point? We had never been where we are now before. It’s only a few hours from home. Hard for us to believe.  We follow signs to a Swinomish casino that advertised a great RV Park near Anacortes.  We pull in and the spaces are inexpensive and provide free wifi. Perfect. They are full.  We made reservations for later and chose our next Park from one of our books.  We get a space at the Pioneer Trails RV Park on Whidbey Island and set up.  That would have been all there was to it in the past.  But our blinders have been skewed and we were able to see and appreciate Washington water and mountains and forest features, spotlighted by the setting sun.  This is a true island and we had to cross Deception Bay Bridge to get here.  This bridge provided a whole scenic vista of its own. 

Deception Bay Bridge

What was amazing is the difference we felt returning to the USA from Canada, as compared to returning to the USA from Mexico.  The people in both areas are wonderful, helpful, friendly people.  Both have different currency. I really think that the greater difference in economic wealth between the US and Mexico (which includes issues such as crime and drugs), along with our own personal failure to learn even a little more of their language, caused us to build up stress for reasons that we never really experienced first hand.  So we let out a mental sigh of relief when we made it to Arizona. We felt almost no change in our psyche or whatever, when entering Washington. I am almost certain that the name familiarity thing was in play again.  We went from Smithers to Nooksack, Samish and Chuckanut Drive.  Little change.