Today was a rather uneventful day…well, most of it. We left Kamloops at 8:30 and 72 degrees with clear blue skies, and before the day was done, it had reached 97. We have no complaints about the heat, after all, we live in Florida. We like warm weather. The drive to the border took most of the morning, through sometimes desert-like areas with yellow grass and sage plants spread everywhere, and later through rolling hills…I guess this was the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. We drove up and over some, down into valleys between them, and around the sides of others, where the rock had been cut to allow for the passage of the roads. And the topography that predominated was small mountains covered with trees…Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, and sometimes aspen, which I can't tell from white birch, to tell the truth. They look the same to me.   And we saw hills that had been cultivated for lumber, some areas replanted, others still waiting. Just before we reached the border, we passed through farmland with fields of corn and raspberries.

We arrived at the border crossing about 11:30 AM and got into the Nexus line. We had been told that out Trusted Traveler cards would speed up the process, but it was not to be. The Nexus line was the slowest because it was long and the other line had three gates to our one. I don’t really understand the benefit of having gone through the process of acquiring this distinction, yet. After using it three times to enter the US, it has not proven to save us any time at all, and today, it cost us half an hour.  They ask us the very same questions, and they take as much time to process us through. I don’t get it…not yet, anyway.

After crossing the border, we drove for quite a while before finding a place where we could have lunch. The area was very rural and the roads only country roads that seemed to be going nowhere. After about an hour, we made it to I-5 and through to Mt. Vernon where we crossed the bridge over the Skagit River. Some may recall that this bridge was knocked out by a truck back in 2013, just before our trip to Vancouver, causing traffic backups that were in the news for weeks. We were forced to sit in stop and go traffic for an hour, through the town, to take an alternate bridge. We did that twice. I believe the bridge was opened the day after we left the area. So today, we were able to cross it on I-5 and continue south, sandwiched between the Cascade mountains on the left and Puget Sound on the right. Not that we saw much of either of them from the highway, but we knew that they were there.

About 20 miles north of Seattle, at only 2:30 in the afternoon, we ran into stop-and-go traffic. And it took us 75 minutes to travel those 20 miles. I remember this traffic from the last time we were here and I honestly cannot understand for the life of me who would want to do this every day, twice a day. It is brutal. After passing through Seattle, the speed picked up for about 5 miles then again we were traveling at about 5-15 miles an hour all the way to Tacoma. This backup, added to the half hour at the border, cost us two hours and a trip to a local winery. On the positive side, we had a wonderful view of Mt. Rainier off in the distance the entire way.

Tomorrow we will venture up into Olympic Park before heading to Eugene, Oregon.