Dateline June 23, 2018, Into Canada, Waterton Lakes

The crossing to Canada

We took the back roads of eastern Washington, having enjoyed Grand Coulee and the other dams, up to the Canadian border, which we have crossed many times. The Canadian Border Patrol has always been delightful: a few questions, and a wave through. This morning was the big exception: the single agent on duty at this small crossing had plainly gotten up on the wrong side of the bed.

He asked us, five different ways, whether we were carrying firearms. We suppose a pair of seventy-year-old rednecks from Florida had it coming! We told him no, which earned us an order to pull over and wait inside the shelter while he searched the Roadtrek for 30 minutes. When we returned to our little home, he had gone through every last corner of the RV, down to the dirty laundry, and left it all a mess. We were good and steamed by then, and John offered that we could turn ourselves around and go home to the States, and that we had never once been treated this way at a Canadian crossing.

It was not a pleasant conversation as he told us we had lied about our wine; we had said five bottles, and he found seven. He told us we did not understand, this was perfectly normal, and that the Americans had searched him his last three times through, which is hard to believe he didn't tell him he was a Canadian agent. Like we said, "wrong side of the bed."

Into the Rockies

Once past him, the sourness lifted, because British Columbia along the border is about as pretty as country gets, and we drove it up and over into Alberta, bound for Waterton Lakes. We stopped here and there for the views; at one, a bridge with a whole colony of barn swallows ferrying food to their young underneath.

Waterton Lakes

Waterton is the Canadian half of Glacier National Park, and it is beautiful. We stayed in the town of Waterton itself, at the Townsite Campground, and spent an afternoon wandering the shops and chasing down an ice cream cone. The cottonwoods were letting go their seeds while we were there, and the cotton lay in drifts along every sidewalk and street.

The campground sat in a gorgeous spot, a lake ringed by mountains, and it was honeycombed with the burrows of ground squirrels, hundreds of them, heads popping up and chirping away without pause.

We got in a round of golf; the vistas were magnificent. We had just reached the sixteenth tee when a park ranger came pedaling up on his bike and asked us to skip the hole. A brown bear and her cub were out grazing in the fairway. Now that, we thought, was worth the price of admission.

In the morning we crossed back into the United States and on to a week in Montana.