Dateline June 23, 2018, Into Canada, Waterton Lakes

The crossing. We took the back roads up to the Canadian border, where we have crossed many a time; usually it is a few questions and a wave through. Not this morning. The agent who drew us had plainly gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, and 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, wait inside, and watch him go through every last corner of the RV for half an hour, down to the dirty laundry, and leave it all a mess. His parting word was that we had lied about our wine; we had said five bottles, and there were seven. We were good and steamed by then, and John offered that we could just turn ourselves around and go home to the States, and that we had never once been treated this way at a Canadian crossing. He told us we did not understand, this was perfectly normal, and that the Americans had searched him his last three times through. Wrong side of the bed, like we said.

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, one of them 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 a beauty. 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 a pause.

We got in a round of golf, too, not the finest course we have played but a glorious place to play it, with the vistas all around.

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.