Day 21 - Closing The Loop

Or "Day 21 - Vancouver As It Should Have Been".

Or "Day 21 - Figure Of Eight".

Or "Day 21 - It's Not An Eight It's A ∞"

The very fact that I'm writing "Day 21" anything is kinda arrogant and decadent. Three weeks we've been out here, detached from the reality of our day to day lives, living instead a Canadian dream of sorts. But it had to come to an end at some point.

We set the alarm a little earlier than usual, and were out on the road by 9:30. We only really had one objective, and that was to get back to Vancouver with enough time left for us to take advantage of the good weather and get to the top of the Vancouver Lookout, and also revisit Canada Place. It didn't take long for the landscape to change as we travelled southwest from Kamloops down Highway 5; the hills soon became more verdant, the pine trees taking over once more, covering everything.

I'd estimated 3-4 hours for the journey, so we planned a stop-off at Hope, approximately two-thirds of the way to Vancouver. There we refuelled His Majesty, and bought some sandwiches and more chips for ourselves. [Note to English people travelling in North America - "crisps" don't exist in Canada. If you want crisps, you ask for chips. If you want chips, you ask for fries.] We drove a short distance to Kawkawa Lake, a totally unsung jewel in a province that is littered with such lakes, and ate our lunch there; you could almost see the "last day depression" hanging over the two of us.

The last stage of the journey re-introduced snow-covered mountain tops as we approached the Coastal Mountains, and then we got stuck in more construction about 15 miles from Vancouver, slowing us to almost a crawl for about 30 minutes. So it wasn't until 3pm that we made it back to the carpark opposite our first hotel (the same carpark in which I'd had a fit with the sat nav when it couldn't pick up a signal almost three weeks ago). We paid for two hours' parking, and headed down to the Vancouver Lookout. It hadn't been worth considering it when we were last here, as the weather had been so dull that the views would have been rubbish, but now, with blue skies all around, the prospects were as good as they could ever be.

Fifteen dollars each secured us tickets that we could use all day (or in our case, any time in the next 1 hour and 45 minutes). We got into the lift, the doors closed, then the ground fell away and the glass front of the elevator revealed the city-scape sliding past, downwards, at a sickening rate. I had to turn away initially, it wasn't fun for me.

At the top though - as is usually the case - the views were stunning. There were few clouds in the sky, and Vancouver and the surrounding area - the harbour, the north shore, the towns of Burnaby and Richmond, the Coastal Mountains, the distant Mount Baker - were all visible (except maybe Mount Baker, the jury's still out on that one). The views were worth the wait.

And then just one thing left; Canada Place, this time with its brilliant white sails set against a background of blue sky, rather than the grey and wet skies that we'd had last time we were here three weeks ago. It was a bit of a photo op, a bit of a trophy-gathering exercise, but we were both glad we'd seen this city in proper summer weather, not just the dank wetness we'd experienced before.

Then back to the carpark with 5 minutes to spare, and the sat nav (which overall has been a bit of a star this holiday) took us to our 14th and final hotel, the Sandman Signature (Airport) hotel. We unpacked everything out of His Majesty, and the sat nav did its final duty, guiding us to the Avis rental car collection point at the airport, where an attendant waved a handheld device at us and told us that we'd done 1,861 kilometres in our vehicle (so that's what the ESP button on the dashboard was for).

1,861 kilometres in HM, approximately half that in F, 700 miles on the train, and just over 300 miles on the ferry - a grand total of 2700 miles, about the same as we did in Alberta.

We got a taxi back to the hotel. "You guys don't have any luggage?" "No, this is the end of our holiday, not the start." Damn, I must stop saying that.

We ate tonight in a Chop steak and fish bar associated with the hotel (not a Moxie's!), both of us ordering far too much and not finishing it all. And now we're sitting in our Sandman-supplied white linen robes, Sandra on our balcony and me just finishing off this blog.

But how do I end a blog like this? How do I sum up my feelings of the last three weeks? How can I get over to people the kind of time we've had? There are these words, and there are the pictures up on the Flickr site. But oh it's been so much more than that. Remember the whale-watching? Did you know that Sandra didn't sleep properly the night after that day, because she was still so excited at what we'd seen? Remember me floundering for the words to describe being alone on Deck 7 of the MV Northern Expedition, a quarter of the world on one side of me and a quarter of the world on the other?

I thought I knew what I was going to get from British Columbia, but it's batted me right out of the park. I wasn't prepared for the size, the scope, the enormity of the place; I wasn't prepared for the people, how friendly, genuine and helpful they've been; and I wasn't prepared to have quite this much fun with the person I love most to share these things with, my perfect foil.

We fly back tomorrow, so I guess that's me done. For now, anyway...

Thanks for reading.

This is British Columbia, signing off.

Day 20 - Kamloops

In 1862 a group of approximately one hundred and forty people (all men except for one pregnant woman) set off from Fort Garry (now Winnipeg, Manitoba), and headed west across the vast Canadian prairies and the Rocky Mountains in search of gold. The group split several times, and a number of men died on the journey, usually from drowning or hypothermia. After seven months of travel one of the groups, the pregnant woman and her husband included, arrived at the confluence of two rivers, the north and south Thompson Rivers, where a small Fort called Kamloops had been set up a few years before. The day after their arrival the woman, Catherine Schubert, gave birth to a daughter, Rose. The influx of this group of settlers, known as the Overlanders, helped establish the town of Kamloops, and Schubert Drive on the north bank of the river is named in honour of Catherine, her husband Alexander, and their family.

The name Kamloops comes from a Sushwap Indian word meaning "meeting of the waters", and you can see the two rivers coming together from the south bank at Riverside Park - which, as discussed at our Italian restaurant last night, is easily accessible down Third Avenue, with a free car park and everything. We drove within an ace of it yesterday afternoon on several occasions it seems, and even stopped to check the map a stone's throw from the main entrance at one point. How we laughed when we realised.

As we ate breakfast this morning we could see that the day was shaping up to be a scorcher, so the morning was destined to be a trip to Riverside Park, assuming we could find it. As it turned out - despite there being a First Avenue and a Third Avenue but no Second Avenue - we got there without much fuss, and walked along the river front, watching a few people cycling or sunbathing or even, in the case of one man, fishing right at the confluence of the two rivers which gives this town its name.

Having walked from one end of the park to the other, we then looped up into the town itself, and took in some of the shops as well as some of the community action stalls that were set up in one part of the road. We stopped at a sandwich shop and bought a beef (and cheese!) sandwich for me, and a salad and pitta bread for Sandra, all freshly made, for our lunch which we intended to eat in the park. We found a picnic table in the sun, spread out our maps and considered the journey we've undertaken so far, with the little bit to complete from Kamloops to Vancouver tomorrow, and pondered what to do that afternoon. But... yanno what? It was warm, it was sunny, it was peaceful. Our options included travelling to Sun Peaks Resort where there is a lake and views, or to Paul Lake Provincial Park where there is a lake and views. Or we could stay in Kamloops Riverside Park where there was a river instead of a lake, and some views.

So we stayed put. We've done enough driving.

We found a bench in the sun and read our books. Occasionally I would get bored or too hot and go for a wander around. On one of these wanders I got talking to a lady who was some sort of park warden. She was using a litter-picker to pick up bottles and cans, and as she worked (not that there were many bottles and cans around) she told me about how the river would flood, sometimes not much if the temperature rose gently and melted the winter snow slowly, sometimes alarmingly fast if the temperature rose sharply or the rains came. She pointed across the river to the north bank, telling me how much it had changed since she'd lived there in 1948 as a girl of two years old, and she discussed the silt and sand and the water table problems with me as I tried to work out her age. Sixty-four? This lithe and agile, sun-bronzed woman with a long pony-tail threaded through the back of her baseball cap was sixty-four? Good grief, count me in on the Kamloops lifestyle.

Another time I walked back across the park, past the sunbathing beautiful people (Kamloops has a lot of beautiful people), to a corner shop to get us some drinks. An LED display near the shop announced that the temperature was 32 degrees, and it felt like it too. A gasping, dry wind was blowing in the unshielded areas of the park; it was easy to see how this area gets the reputation as the desert region of British Columbia.

At 4pm it was starting to get hazy, and I wanted to get back to the hotel before the rush hour started and made driving difficult again. We headed back, parked up, and walked over to the Visitor Information centre to take a picture of the fifteen foot long wooden trout outside, probably the last "big thing" we'll photograph this holiday.

We went back to the hotel room and chilled for a bit, then ate in the same pleasant Italian restaurant as last night. It was just as good.

Tomorrow we've got a longish drive down to Vancouver, but we intend to set off early enough to give us a chance to revisit those places that we only saw in the rain three weeks ago.

That'll be holiday-early then...

Day 19 - Kelowna Redeems Itself

I had a bit of a downer on Kelowna last night. I'd heard good reports about it prior to our visit out here, but the three-mile journey from the Okanagan Lake Bridge to our hotel had soiled the image for me. So what if there was a model of a lake-monster here? So what if there was a city park? What about all those burger houses and Wendys and Dead Timmy's? What about those miles of car dealerships and warehouses?

Oh, a correction, by the way; it's not "Okanagan" rhymes with "O'Flanagan", it's "Okanagan" pronounced "Oaken-aaaaagen", sorry.

The only thing I really wanted to do was get a photograph of the model Ogopogo for my "big things" collection. Ogopogo is the Okanagan Lake equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. It's supposedly a big serpent that lives in the lake, and there's a jolly model of it in the city park. With His Majesty refuelled, and my trainee navigatress trembling in the seat next to me, we set off to find it.

Kelowna is a Salish Indian word meaning "grizzly bear". Apple trees were planted here in the mid-1800s, and ever since then fruit has been grown here, hence Kelowna's reputation as the orchard capital of British Columbia. Funnily enough there are no reports of Ogopogo having been seen before the first settlers arrived here in the mid-1800s... after the first crop of cider, perhaps?

Sandra did an excellent job and navigated us back through the three miles of dealerships to City Park, which sits on the edge of Okanagan Lake. And there we had a surprise. It's beautiful. Okay, the sunshine helped, but the view across the lake to the brown and dry hills beyond is impressive. It's set off by the relatively new and brilliantly thought out Waterfront Park a little further along the lakefront, joined to City Park by an expansive marina. A stark white statue, Sails, rises 40 feet into the air and marks the start (or end, depending on your direction of travel) of the marina. The plaque at the bottom of the statue informs that the statue arrived and was lowered into place by helicopter, which must have been a hell of a sight.

Not far from the statue is Ogopogo himself, green and hooped like any good lake monster should be. We waited twenty minutes to get a shot of him clear of children and Japanese tourists, before giving up and walking on to Waterfront Park. What a treat this place is, so new, so clean, with such amazing views over the lake. There's even an outdoor stage built on a small island before a grassy amphitheatre, just right for small concerts or summer plays. It's very pretty and very impressive.

After a slow, leisurely walk, we headed back to Ogopogo, sneaked in between the families and the Asian tourists to get our own photos, then headed back into City Park where we ate sandwiches overlooking the lake and the marvellous piece of architecture and engineering which is the Okanagan Lake Bridge. This is a 4600 foot floating piece of road anchored to the lake bed at strategic points, and the only structure of its type in Canada.

It was almost half past one now, and time to set off for Kamloops. A shortish journey this one, only a couple of hours; along Highway 97C to Merritt and then up Highway 5 to Kamloops (from here you can follow Highway 97 to Prince George, where we stopped en-route on the train this time last week). The landscape, already brown and barren, becomes more so as you get closer to Kamloops. By the time we pulled into the carpark of our hotel, forests were a thing of the past; the hills around this town are parched and difficult for vegetation. The blast of heat that hit us when we stepped out of the air-conditioned interior of HM was like anything we've experienced in the Mediterranean.

We're here for two nights, and following almost of week of one night stands, I'd booked us into somewhere with a little luxury; a King Size bed (in case we argue), and a bath with a built-in jacuzzi (a picture of Sandra's face just now when the whirlpool action started would have been priceless, but also banned from the Flickr site). The helpful girl on reception gave us a map and directions to Riverside Park on the south-side of the Thompson River which flows through downtown Kamloops. I should have known better; directions supplied by a woman, and navigation by another woman. Instead of Riverside Park on the south-side, we ended up, vexed and tense, on McArthur Island Park on the north-side. Still, there we stumbled upon a colony of yellow-bellied marmots, and watched two bald-headed eagles gliding lazily across the river, and everything was well again.

Dinner tonight was at a brilliant Italian restaurant across the carpark from our hotel. Our waitress, a bustling and busy woman called Penny, gave us even more directions to Riverside Park, aided by her fellow waitresses ("Is Riverside Park on First or Second Avenue?" "Third!"). Tomorrow will be an interesting day.

Day 18 - The Okanagan Valley

Our plan today was to drop us right down to the bottom of British Columbia, almost to the border with the United States, head west, then cut back up through the fertile Okanagan (rhymes with "O'Flanagan") Valley to end up at Kelowna for the night. A wine-tasting visit at one of the many wine-producers in the region was going to be used to break the journey up, and also for enjoyment - this is a holiday, after all.

We had a complementary breakfast of muffin and coffee in the foyer of the Mountain Hound Inn in Nelson, then set off on what was to be the longest drive of this holiday, 250 miles in about four and a half hours.

The weather wasn't the best, but again I'd been expecting that, and I didn't mind cloudy weather for driving. We headed south-west to Castlegar and picked up Highway 3 which took us right down to the Canada-USA border. We stopped off after a couple of hours at Grand Forks in the Boundary Country to stretch our legs and use the washrooms. A very helpful lady at the Visitor Information Centre supplied us with booklets of the Okanagan Valley wine-growing region, and using these we located the Red Rooster winery recommended in my guide book.

We set off again, the mountains left behind, replaced with rolling, wooded hills (pine trees again, I'm afraid). It was a little like driving in the highlands of Scotland, until we breasted a hill and saw the Okanagan Valley stretched out below us, with the Okanagan Mountains reaching from skyline to skyline beyond the valley. We found a convenient spot and ate lunch while a tiny chipmunk ran up and down outside the car (we didn't feed him though - feeding the wildlife is illegal).

After lunch we headed down into the lush valley itself. The first town we encountered was Osoyoos (think of the Russian Soyuz space programme and put an "O" in front of it), sitting on Osoyoos Lake. They're very sparing with names in this part of British Columbia. The contrast between the green valley floor and the dry brown hills either side is very marked. The Canadian Rockies and the Columbia Mountains block this valley off from most of the severe weather experienced by the rest of BC in winter, resulting in a semi-arid and almost desert environment. Settlers arriving here after travelling for weeks and months through boreal forest must have thought they'd arrived in the Promised Land.

The region is becoming famous for its wine production, but fruit and vegetables are produced in great numbers here (sin of the day went to "The Tomatoe [sic] Patch"). In contrast to the vast majority of British Columbia, this is farming land. We saw horses, cattle, sheep, and even a field of rapeseed, its distinctive yellow a welcome relief after two and a half weeks of pine-green.

Unfortunately we weren't seeing the valley at its best, as by now it was raining a little, and it continued to spit as we drove through Penticton and on to the Red Rooster winery. The choice of the Red Rooster was purely because it happens to be mentioned in my guide book; there are almost a hundred such wineries around Osoyoos, Penticton and Kelowna, all producing - from what we've experienced so far on this trip - very good wine indeed. What sold me on the Red Rooster was the sentence, "enjoy a tasting of the winery's acclaimed [wines], then soak up the lake views over a cheese platter". Indeed there is an outdoor seating area to enjoy such views and such cheeses. It's open Thursday to Monday. Not Tuesday.

Still, we had a tasting of five of their wines, and bought two bottles that we liked. Sandra got all excited and bought a new "forspecial" wine glass - it'll be interesting to see if she can get that home without breaking it. [Update - the wine glass made it home without breaking.]

It was about 4pm now, and still an hour's drive to Kelowna. The scenery was again spectacular, Highway 97 hugging Okanagan Lake as we headed north. Coming this way, the road whips you into Kelowna over the lake on a huge and steep bridge, slips you past the interesting and touristy parts of the city before you know what's happened, and plunges you onto a six-lane highway past the most ridiculous number of hotels, motels, vehicle dealerships, and fast food emporiums (emporia?) either side of you. Also, by now it was rush hour, and the road was clogged with trucks, lorries and buses, all around me, and all knowing where they were going - unlike me.

As if that wasn't enough, His Majesty chose this moment to make a new noise, this one to tell me that he was running out of fuel. I knew this was coming, I'd had my eye on the gauge for a while, but I could have done without the added reminder. We've done almost 700 miles since I filled him up in Revelstoke.

Just at that moment our Days Inn hotel appeared, and I wearily pulled HM onto the carpark. These chain hotels are never going to win prizes for luxury, but for £70 we've got a large and clean room with a bath and shower, two queen-sized beds (in case we argue), free internet (come on UK, get with the free internet in hotels for crying out loud), free parking, and a complementary breakfast. And free ice. I've never mentioned the free ice on these blogs, have I? Every hotel we get to, one of the first things we do is go on a hunt for the free ice machine. Can't drink bacardi and coke or a Mott's caesar without ice, dude.

Tomorrow we intend to (a) fill HM's tank up with fuel, (b) get ourselves back into Kelowna town centre and do the touristy stuff (have to find Ogopogo), then (c) have a leisurely two hour drive to Kamloops and our penultimate hotel. And the weather forecast for the next three days looks absolutely top notch - maybe Sandra will get me up that Vancouver Tower on Friday after all.

Day 17 - Chasing The Sun

I don't do the whole yin-yang thing, by which I mean I don't believe that the good things that happen in life are balanced out by the bad things (though I do love My Name Is Earl). However, by the law of averages, because of the number of amazing days we've had so far on this holiday, we were due a "bad" day, and this was probably it.

We woke up to rain in Revelstoke. We'd expected that, it was forecast, but we were hoping that travelling south to Nelson, we could catch up with the sun. Nelson is in the Kootenays region of British Columbia (it's pronounced koot-nayz, not kooteeneez as my Jawa wife pronounces it). Nelson is about 155 miles by road from Revelstoke, and approximately 120 miles further south, so it's getting down to the bottom of British Columbia. Google Maps estimated it as a 4 hour journey, which I thought we'd break up with a visit to the town of Sandon, once a thriving mining town, now an example of a North American ghost town.

Having filled His Majesty's tank with Esso Regular ("oh yah, those credit cards won't work in the pump if you're from... overseas"), we set off, with the rain coming to a stop and blue sky appearing, south along Highway 23. Give me an open road with beautiful scenery like Highway 23, a powerful and comfortable car like HM, no other traffic around me, and I will drive all day. The thirty-mile trip down to Shelter Bay, where we had to catch a ferry across the Upper Arrow Lake, was an absolute breeze. At Shelter Bay we parked up and waited about 25 minutes for the ferry to make it back across the lake and unload passengers from the other side, then we were shepherded on, the ramps raised, and the short trip across the lake began.

Before we reached Galena Bay on the other side, the rain had caught us up again, and as we disembarked I had to switch the windscreen wipers on. HM has an almost infinite array of intermittent wipe options, varying from once an Ice Age, to more rpm than a Formula 1 engine. I spent ages trying to find a comfortable wipe-speed, by which time we'd left the rain behind again.

We drove on down Highway 23, with Upper Arrow Lake on our right, providing beautiful views. At Nakusp we took Highway 6 east to New Denver ("Isn't there a New Denver in America?" "No, that's just Denver"). From there Highway 31A heads further east, and then a turn-off down a minor road is signposted towards Sandon. The sign points out that Sandon is a Heritage Site. They have to point that out, because most people have never heard of Sandon and don't know what it is (when we were there we met a couple from BC who hadn't known it existed before that day).

The minor road became a track that could only be called a road because part of it (and not the greater part) had a tarmac covering. Rounding a bend we surprised a deer, rooting around for food in the middle of the road. It looked up as we approached, watched us for a moment, and then twitched its ears as it heard a vehicle coming from the opposite direction. It bolted then, bounding with great agility up a steep incline and vanishing into the surrounding trees (pine, of course).

We got to the end of the track and there was a bridge and some dingy buildings and some old buses parked up. We crossed the bridge, drove past the buildings and buses and tried to find a carpark. A dirty sign suggested there might be a carpark in the offing, but we drove past it to another sign that affirmed it was the museum carpark. The clouds were starting to roll in again.

I'm going to have a bit of a pop at Sandon here. It's a dump. There are piles of scrap metal on show on the main thoroughfare. There are wrecked buses, bits of farm equipment, old engines in rows. In amongst all this mess are real exhibits; an old steam train that is being restored, old mining carts, old buildings that might or might not be of historical interest, but all overgrown with long grass and weeds. My guide book told us to go to the restored City Hall and pick up a walking tour guide book for two bucks. We got to City Hall and it was locked, a Post-It in the window saying, "BAK IN 5" [sic]. When we went back in 10, it was open, and there was a young lad behind the counter. I asked for a walking tour guide book, and he told me, "we're sold oot". Being "sold oot" of your guide book isn't acceptable, Sandon. The rest of City Hall was filled with over-priced history books, trivia unrelated to Sandon, and tat jewellery.

We left City Hall and walked up the hill a ways to the Sandon Museum, but met a couple who said that they'd met another couple who had said that the museum was full of nothing interesting, just rocks and glass. Looking through the window I believed them, so we gave the museum a miss. We walked on up to a couple of old wooden buildings that looked interesting, but they were just derelict and rotting. Earlier, by the carpark, we'd met a Danish couple who said they had been expecting a fully-restored "Wild West" town. I wasn't expecting that, but I was expecting something a bit more than old sheds.

Sandon could be so much more than this. The people we saw working there seemed to be working hard and with a passion, but they need more. I wanted to contribute by buying a guide book, and I might have bought more had there been a better infrastructure, but there wasn't. There were enough people visiting Sandon today to make me think something decent could be made of it. Come on, BC, sort something out.

Disappointed (I'd wanted something much more interesting and informative from Sandon), we set off back to New Denver and Highway 6 south... where we promptly got stuck in a traffic jam at Silverton caused, as we later found out, by a fallen tree. We were hungry, frustrated, and not going anywhere.

Twenty-five minutes later the jam cleared, we drove on, and stopped to eat our lunch at the first rest area we came across. We were overlooking the beautiful Slocan Lake, the sky was clearing, and things were starting to look good.

The final hour and a half to Nelson were an echo of the start of our journey earlier that day; a clear road and good driving. The sun was shining as we parked up outside our hotel, the Mountain Hound Inn, in the middle of town. We explored the town and got a feel for this pretty, bustling place, before eating an excellent meal at the Redfish Grill just down from our hotel. We talked about our day and realised that, though Sandon was a bit of a disappointment, it hadn't really been that bad a day. We also talked - briefly - about something our waitress Trista had said the night before, in Revelstoke. "If you like Canada, you should visit the Maritimes." Hmmm. The Maritimes. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island.

"What's so special about Prince Edward Island?", asked Sandra.
"It's famous for one particular shellfish," I answered. "Mussels".

You should have seen her eyes light up. Is this the germination of Project 2012?

Tomorrow, the Okanagan Valley, wine, and - hopefully - more sunshine.

Day 16 - Field to Revelstoke

We had a slow start this morning, breakfasting at Truffle Pigs, then checking out of The Kicking Horse Lodge and going for a brief walk around the town of Field (it's so small a brief walk is the only kind you can have, otherwise you start doing laps). On the way round we bumped into Sean Cunningham, one of the co-owners of Truffle Pigs, and the person who had checked us into the hotel the day before. He's such a friendly, open and honest bloke, and was keen to find out our opinion of the restaurant. I told him I had been expecting a choice of burgers and pizzas, not gourmet cooking, and he laughed and said that they do get some people going into the restaurant expecting that sort of fast food, and walking out five minutes later when they've seen the menu. He was also interested in which wine we'd chosen, and was effusive about the wine-producing region of BC, which we will be entering the day after tomorrow.

It was a great chat with an interesting guy, and at the end of it we shook hands and he wished us well for the rest of the holiday. Oh, and he also cleared something up - it is Salmon Arm, not Samlon Arm.

We then drove on the few kilometres to Emerald Lake, which is recommended in my Moon guide book, and was also recommended highly by an American couple we had been chatting to in the restaurant last night. When you get there, you can see why. It's another gorgeous lake in a long line of Rocky Mountain gorgeous lakes. Once again the "rock flour" washed down from the mountains mingles with the water to produce that distinctive turquoise colour, as the particles in the water reflect back the blue wavelengths of light from the sun. On this occasion the water was almost mirror-smooth, hardly any breeze upon the surface, and the reflections of the landscape in the lake were stunning.

We'd been told by the American couple we spoke to last night that there was a walk you could do around the lake that took about an hour, ninety minutes at most. We set off on that walk, leaving behind the coachloads of Japanese tourists that had turned up in their brightly coloured plastic macs, meandering our way through the posh and expensive (I know because I looked into booking one) chalets that cluster at this end of the lake. Suddenly the paved path ended, and a woodland path began. The sort of path that leads through woodland. The sort of woodland with bears in it.

Reasoning that a lot of people take this path, and that we could chatter and make a lot of noise to warn bears of our coming, we set off along the walk. We seemed to be the only people going that way (anti-clockwise), because we met a lot of people coming the other way. No bears though, just a couple of squirrels and a very noisy woodpecker.

It was a nice walk, just over 3 miles. Most of it was through pine-forest, with occasional breaks to look out over the lake and mountains opposite. The lake has its own micro-climate, one side of the lake sheltered and sun-warmed, the other wet and winter-blasted. This results in entirely different flora and fauna on either side of the lake, exciting news if you're a flora and fauna fan, but merely a note of passing interest if you're on the watch for bears and also - by this time, for me at least - a washroom.

We got back to the carpark by the early afternoon, found a washroom as a matter of some import, then bought sandwiches and set off for Revelstoke. The plan was to take it easy, driving through Glacier National Park, admiring the views.

Immediately I had my first serious argument of the holiday with the sat nav. Revelstoke, I knew, was two hours west of Golden on Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. And Golden was about an hour from Emerald Lake. The sat nav wanted to take me on a nearly 500 mile, 13 hour journey down Highway 95 through Radium Hot Springs and back up through Nelson (actually part of the journey we'll be taking tomorrow). I ignored the sat nav, and drove on along Highway 1. She'd see my way eventually.

We stopped in a rest area just before Golden and ate our sandwiches looking out over a railway line, a river, and a mountain range. The sat nav was still telling me to turn around at my earliest convenience. Having eaten, we pushed on through Golden. Sean Cunningham from Truffle Pigs had told us that we shouldn't expect a lot from Golden, and he was right, it was a bit of a dump (not helped by the amount of construction going on there). I was glad I'd not picked this town as one of my places to overnight.

By the time we went past a signpost telling us to put our watches back an hour because we were entering Pacific Daylight Time from Mountain Daylight Time (bizarrely the timezones don't change at the provincial borders), the sat nav had capitulated, and our trip through the beautiful scenery of Glacier National Park was uninterrupted.

We got to our hotel in Revelstoke at 16:00 PDT, checked in, found that Spain had won the world cup and that there had been a total solar eclipse in the South Pacific, then had a walk in the sunshine into downtown Revelstoke.

My Moon travel book refers to Revelstoke as a "midsize city of 8,500". Hello, that's not a city. The town consists of a smallish number of roads in a grid pattern, a number of very nice-looking shops (it's Sunday today, so shopping opportunities are limited), a railway line, outlying suburbs, and mountain scenery to kill for. The atmosphere, as is often the case with towns in British Columbia, is redolent of sap and sawdust. It was baking hot as we walked into town, so we stopped to buy ice-creams, sat down... and it started raining. Damn. It was only a shower, and we soon were able to loop through the town and head back to our hotel.

Dinner tonight was a smoked salmon pasta dish for us both at Zala's Steak and Pizza House, a five minute walk from the hotel. It was a lot different to Truffle Pigs, but a chatty canuck waitress called Trista ("well you can tell the difference between a Welsh accent and an English accent, can't you?") added to the enjoyment of the meal.

This holiday seems to be running through my fingers like sand now. Just a few days left. Ghost town tomorrow, wine-producing region the day after. Stick with us.

Day 15 - Reparations Down The Icefield Parkway

When we started planning this holiday we saw there were opportunities to go back and do things in the Rockies that we'd not had time to do in 2008, and re-do things which hadn't worked out as we'd wanted them to. The Jasper Tramway experience yesterday was one of the former. Our visits to Peyto Lake and the Columbia Icefield were examples of the latter.

Today, July 10th, was two years ago to the very day that we set off from Canmore to Jasper up the Icefield Parkway. That was a day of adventure which involved an unscheduled stop at Field, British Columbia, a visit to Peyto Lake which was snowed off, a visit to the Athabasca Glacier which was equally as snowy and, though amazing in itself, not quite what we wanted, and finally an unexpected but totally welcome encounter with a black bear.

Today we intended to recreate some of that journey, but this time in reverse, starting in Jasper, travelling down the Icefield Parkway, and ending up, totally scheduled, at Field, British Columbia. We wanted to re-visit both the Athabasca Glacier and Peyto Lake without the snow.

Would the weather hold for us this year?

Unfortunately, as we checked out of our hotel in Jasper, the weather didn't look too good. It was raining as we got onto Highway 93 south, and the forecast for the Columbia Icefields was more rain and also thunder.

Doggedly, we pushed on. What else could we do?

We stopped at a booth, bought a day-pass to the Jasper National Park, and entered the Icefield Parkway with the windscreen wipers going and Doves playing on the stereo (yesterday in Jasper I'd bought a mini-jack to mini-jack lead so that I could plug my MP3 player into His Majesty; part of my unredeemed nature wants to take a photo of my naked bum and upload it onto the car's hard drive for use as a backdrop on the LCD screen).

Along with the day-pass, they supplied a map, so now Sandra was navigating. Regular readers of this blog will know that my darling wife has many amazing qualities, but her ability to read a map is not one of them. "That'll be Honeymoon Lake," she said proudly, pointing, in the wrong direction, to a bend in the Athabasca River (or, as she calls it, the Alabaster River). When a signpost for Honeymoon Lake showed up 12km later, she wisely kept quiet.

I believe everyone should drive down the Icefield Parkway at least once during their life. The Rockies there are almost indescribable. The individual mountains are huge, enormous, great slabs of rock stretching up into the sky; ash-coloured, snow-capped, they stand impassive either side of the tiny road that threads through them. They look broken, jagged, new, whatever new means geologically. I swear that if you brought warmongers here and drove them down the Icefield Parkway, the world would be a more peaceful place.

The rain stopped, though there were still torn clouds around the peaks of the mountains, adding to the atmosphere of the journey. Then suddenly, rounding a bend, the great Columbia Icefield hove into view, the Athabasca Glacier on the right-hand side of the road and the Visitor Centre on the left. We parked up, and looked over at that great sheet of ice. No clouds. No snow. Warmer than 2008. Do we go for it?

We went for it.

Tickets purchased, we didn't have to wait long before we were being transported in one of the enormous Icefield Explorer vehicles up the glacier. The patter from the excellently informed driver was familiar, but all we wanted was the glacier experience without the snow-storm. And thankfully we got it. No blue skies - like a killer whale jumping out of the water, that's an exception rather than the rule - but we did have amazingly clear views of either side of the glacier, and the interior, where it joins up with the rest of the Columbia Icefield. One of the advertising blurbs for this trip says, "stand on ice as thick as the Eiffel Tower is tall"... kind of makes you shiver, and not because of the cold.

Somehow in the thirty minutes we had allotted to explore (not that you can do much exploring, it's too dangerous a place for jay-walking), we got talking to a mother and her daughter, also from England, who had been travelling around BC and Alberta.

"We're staying with friends of ours in Samlon Arm."
"Where?"
"Samlon Arm."
"Don't you mean Salmon Arm?"
"Well our friends have lived there for years, and they call it Samlon Arm."

I think either their friends are taking the mickey out of them, or the people of Salmon Arm are taking the mickey out of their friends. You decide.

Pleased that we'd seen the Glacier in most of its glory, we ate lunch in the carpark of the visitor centre, then headed off to Peyto Lake. It was another hour before we got there, and it was quite a strange and funny experience to pull into the carpark that, last time we'd been there, looked like a winter wonderland. Now, with the sun breaking through the clouds, it looked like a completely different place.

The walk up to the Peyto Lake viewpoint is only a short one, pine-scented and pretty. But it does nothing to prepare you for the view that awaits you. You step out onto a wooden platform, and an eye-stretching panorama greets you. To the left is Peyto Glacier, which basically melts and runs into an enormous basin, forming a lake with the characteristic turquoise colour we've come to expect from lakes in the Rockies. In the centre and to the right, the lake itself splays out like an enormous topaz; the Rocky Mountains and the Mistaya River Canyon, into which the lake drains, stretch out as far as the eye can see. What would this view have been like on a snowy day two years ago? I've no idea, but it was staggering today.

Suitably humbled, we made our way back to HM, only our rendezvous with my mates Jeff or Matt and the "BC RoadCam Challenge" left on our agenda. As we pulled out of the Peyto Lake parking lot, I asked my navigator how much further we had to go before the turn off for Field.

"Two inches," came the reply.

Roadside car gaggles - we saw a few in 2008, and we'd seen a couple already today. They usually mean some kind of wildlife. At one a woman was holding her hands to her head in an obscure mime, helpfully mouthing "deer"... we drove on. At another we saw nothing, and didn't even know what people were looking for.

And now, here, another. I sighed. A bear, perhaps? Done that. An elk? Big whoopah. A deer? Yawn. But then, over to the left... a thing of limbs and joints, dirty grey, huge and with a head half the size of its body... "It's a moose!" I cried, indicating frantically, slowing down barely safely, pulling HM into the side of the road. The moose angled its way up the side of the embankment opposite, as ungainly as Peter Crouch going for goal. It chomped at a few leaves, oblivious to the attention it was drawing. It was a female, missing the characteristic antlers of the male, and as such only stood about 6 feet tall at the shoulder, and weighed only about 40 stone. I've rarely seen an animal so ugly that brought me so much joy.

At last we pulled into the information centre at Field, where we'd stopped for a pee-break two years earlier. I positioned HM in such a place where, if Jeff or Matt had managed to stay up late enough in England, then they would be able to pick him up in a roadcam picture. After a suitable wait, and with directions from the information centre, we made our way to our ninth hotel, The Kicking Horse Lodge.

Field has a population of about 300 people. I was expecting a meal tonight of burgers or pizza. Let me introduce you to Truffle Pigs Bistro, associated to The Kicking Horse Lodge. The place was rammed. We had to wait 45 minutes for a table. People come from all over to eat at this restaurant.

Ourselves, we ate in splendour, by a country mile the best meal we've eaten in Canada on this holiday or the last. And the wine, from the Okanagan Valley, which we shall be visiting in a few days, was just superb.

I really don't want this holiday to end.

Day 14 - Again Jasper

Two jobs to sort out first thing today. One, pick up the new hire car, two, exchange some travellers cheques because the cash is running low.

We walked down to Jasper town centre and found the Avis Car Rental booth on Connaught Drive. Everything in order, the girl serving us (who looked about 15, and probably weighed less than the ring she was wearing through the side of her nose) told us our car was the red one across the road. She pointed out of the window to a horror of dents and scratched paintwork.

"That?"
"No, the one behind it."

The clouds parted, angels sang, and there he was, His Majesty. My throat dried instantly; from here, it looked like a Bentley.

When booking a vehicle for this sort of journey, I have two things in mind; space and comfort. We need space for the luggage, we need comfort because we're travelling hundreds of miles. I don't want some little short-wheelbase boneshaker that you put on rather than get in. By the same token, luxury isn't one of my criteria when it comes to booking a car for this sort of holiday. However the problem, when booking on a North American website, is that it says things like, "Example of this range : Chevrolet Impala". I have no idea how big a Chevrolet Impala is. So I try to book on a combination of price, estimated size, and how many suitcase icons they have by the side of the picture of the car.

His Majesty is a Chrysler 300. He has wood trim on the inside. He has an options menu I can use to switch on and off various features, like the "beep horn on door lock" option (effectively, I can turn off his keypad bleep). He has an LCD screen on the dashboard on which I can display my photos. Display my photos? Yes, because he has an in-built 28GB hard drive that I can upload things onto. I'm driving a car that has a hard drive. I'M DRIVING A CAR THAT HAS A HARD DRIVE.

It's insane.

Too scared to drive him initially, we went to the bank and exchanged some of my two year old travellers cheques for cash, then came back.

And now we came to a moment, the harsh reality of a promise casually made two years ago. At that time - almost to the day - in this very town, we were faced with a choice; we had half a day left, did we go on the very-high-vertigo-inducing Jasper Tramway, or did we go to Maligne Lake?

"We'll go to Maligne Lake," I'd said, my fear of heights making the decision for me. "I promise we'll do the Tramway next time we're here."

Today was next time.

So we set off along Connaught Drive, Sandra barking directions at me until I told her to shut up. Didn't she realise I was using 95% of my brain to drive this car? (Breathe in, breathe out... contract myocardia... ooh she's pretty.)

The Tramway is only about 5 miles from Jasper town centre. It was completed in 1964, and provides a means of getting from the ground to almost the very top of Whistlers Mountain, taking you 3000 feet up in 7.5 white-knuckled minutes (I should point out that this mountain is completely different to the Whistler Mountain in British Columbia; this one gets its name from the whistling sound made by the hoary marmot that lives on and around the peak). If you want to get to the very top, you have to walk the rest of the way, and at your own peril.

I was expecting there to be a long wait for a free gondola to take us to the top, but no, like the Icefield Parkway in 2008 we only had to wait about half an hour (and like the Icefield Parkway, they call each trip a flight - which, I suppose, it almost is). They called our flight, Flight 25, at 12:36, and we boarded our gondola along with about twenty other people. I wasn't enjoying myself, and grabbed hold of a rail quickly.

The flight took off and before I knew it we were over the carpark with a sickening drop below us. But to be honest, that was the worst part of the journey. After that you're over the side of the mountain, and even though a "gravitational disaster" at that point will still kill you, it doesn't look that much of a drop.

Of course, once at the top and on solid ground, the whole thing was worth it, especially with the sort of good weather we were having. From the Upper Station, almost 7500 feet above sea level, Whistlers Mountain rose up behind us. It appears devoid of wildlife (it was certainly devoid of those damnable pine-trees), but information boards told of the Alpine creatures that eke out an existence, even up here; the aforementioned hoary marmot, the white-tailed Ptarmigan, the ground squirrel, all form part of a micro-ecosystem at the top of the mountain.

To the northeast we could see the town of Jasper, J-shaped and nestled into the valley alongside the Athabasca river. To the northwest, over 50 miles away, almost imagined rather than seen, Mount Robson rose up out of the Rockies. To the southeast, that same mountain range marched off into the seemingly impossible distance. This time I really could see for a hundred miles.

We had a coffee and biscuits in the Treeline Restaurant, Sandra beaming fit to split, me enjoying myself but still remembering we had to get back down. If you're a hiker, you can head on up to the top of the mountain (at your own risk, as the guides are keen to point out). If you're a sightseer, you catch the next convenient "flight" back down - they go every 7 or 8 minutes, and we were back on proper ground by about 2pm.

We then drove out to Medicine Lake, ostensibly so that I could get a little more used to driving His Majesty, but also because it was a nice day and Medicine Lake is a beautiful lake. After a while there we drove back to the hotel, parked up, and walked into Jasper for some souvenir shopping and a well-deserved Kokanee Gold beer.

The day was rounded off with dinner at another sushi restaurant (more chopstick hilarity, but she's getting better), and now we're packed up and ready for the long haul back to Vancouver.

Lots of adventures still to have yet.

Day 13 - The Skeena Train to Jasper

Another "early" start - eating breakfast in the Ramada Inn, Prince George, at 8:15 am. Sandra didn't want to be late for the train. We'd been told that boarding would start about 9:30; we were at the station for 9:05. No one else was. Nor was the train. Just a track stretching out for miles in both directions in a heat that was already starting to bake the ground dry, even at that time in the morning.

15 minutes later a few more people had arrived, and the train came rumbling in, huge and impassive in the heat. We boarded and were off at 9:45, the honour of shouting the "ALLLABBBBBBOOOARD!" being given to the young and excited son of the family sitting opposite us (of course I wanted to do it).

The first part of the journey was across the Interior Plateau still. What? Didn't we spend hours and hours crossing that yesterday? Well yes we did, and we spent the morning crossing it today. Bruce came round with his trolley, and I told him I'd looked up Hans Island on the internet last night.

"And?"
"It's a bit small, isn't it?"
"Small? Never mind small, the war'll be big."

Greater men than I may have stayed awake longer on that train. I dropped the seat back (no one in the seats behind us) and slept for the better part of an hour, waking bleary-eyed and confused at about 11:30. We were still on the Interior Plateau. Laying the railroad through here must have been a soul-destroying job.

We stopped to let a freight train come past. Bruce invited us to count how many cars it was pulling. I counted 90. A quick bit of research says that railcars are about 60 feet long including couplers, so not including the two locomotives pulling it that freight train was over a mile long.

Lunchtime. Bruce arrived with his trolley.

"You want anything from my trolley?"
"Is it the same choice as yesterday?"
"They're the same sandwiches as yesterday, just a day older."

Yesterday I'd asked him for the options, he'd said "beef and cheese". I'd asked for cheese. He'd told me, "no, it's beef and cheese. Or ham and cheese". The sandwiches were the worst part of the journey, truly dire creations on thick white bread with processed meat and processed cheese.

Later on we stopped at downtown Penny to pick up a couple of passengers, thus reducing the population of that town considerably (11 people live there, plus 9 dogs). There are a number of towns like that, dotted along the line. What sort of people live there? In Penny, you've really got to get along with the other 10 inhabitants.

We'd left the Skeena River behind yesterday, and now we were following the Fraser River, one of the four great rivers that drain British Columbia (the others being the Skeena, the Liard in the very far north, and the mighty Peace River, the only river to cross the Rockies). Indeed the Fraser goes on further south where it grows until eventually it flows through Vancouver city and out into the Strait of Georgia. In time, though, we left even the Fraser behind, and moved into the Robson Valley, part of the astounding Rocky Mountain Trench which extends for approximately a thousand miles from northern British Columbia and into Montana.

Finally that enormous forest of pine was breaking up, though it wasn't finished yet. We had mountains either side of us now, the Rocky Mountains to the north, and the Cariboo Mountains to the south. The pine trees weren't able to make it up the sides of these harsh mountain ranges, and we were seeing more stone and snow. We passed through Dunster, whose claim to fame is that it houses one of the few remaining original Grand Trunk Pacific Railway stations; it looked like it needed some work doing on it though. Dunster is a positive metropolis for this area, with a population of 90 people; on its own website it pleads for donations to keep the site going, as it costs $21 per month to host...

And then Mount Robson climbed high into the blue sky. At almost 13,000 feet it is the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. Like a wall of snow-covered granite it rose, dwarfing everything around it, harsh and majestic, a fitting climax to our trip.

For at last our long train journey was coming to a close. Jasper was in sight, it was time to pack up, hide uneaten beef and cheese sandwiches under the seat, and say farewell to the Skeena train, and to Bruce and Patrick, and the rest of the crew, who had brought us 700 miles from the west coast and into another province. The train slowly pulled into Jasper, and I recognised some of the sights and buildings from the last time we had been here in 2008 (Jasper being the first overseas holiday location to which Sandra and I have ever returned).

We awkwardly stepped off the train - my backside having gone to sleep three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ago - and I told Bruce I'd see what we could do about those Harriers for his Hans Island war. We picked up our bags and walked the half mile or so in 30 degree heat to our hotel - the Chateau Jasper, the same one we stayed in last time we were here (it completes the figure of 8, as Sandra rightly pointed out).

The train journey was an interesting one, and it served a purpose, i.e. getting us from Prince Rupert to Jasper without us having to drive. It wasn't what I expected. In some places the endless trees almost drove me mad. But we saw some amazing scenery I probably wouldn't have had time to enjoy if I'd been driving.

Would I recommend such a journey to anyone else? Yes I would, but I'd warn them that it's a long time on a train (I don't think I could cross the whole of Canada this way), and there's a hell of a lot of trees.

Would I do it again myself? Yes. But I'd take my own sandwiches.

Day 12 - The Skeena Train to Prince George

The day dawned foggy (an American couple asked us if we were Australians as we checked out of the hotel), and it was still foggy when the taxi dropped us off at the VIA rail terminal in the same place we'd been dropped off by the ferry two days before. We checked in, got our boarding passes, and while Sandra went to use the washroom (they don't seem to have toilets here, just washrooms), I went outside into the carpark. I could hear the warning ding-ding-ding of a North American level crossing, and then howling out of the fog came the blare of our train's horn. The train materialised out of the fog, huge and silver, and pulled to a slow stop in front of the short queue of people waiting for it.

Our suitcases already checked in, we just boarded with hand-luggage, found some seats (amazingly roomy) in the economy class section, and settled down. For extra bucks you can go in the cabin where the windows run from one side to the other, giving a complete 180 degree view of the landscape. But since at least 100 degrees of that 180 is sky, I'd decided we wouldn't bother. Given the scorcher today turned out to be, I'm glad we didn't, it must have been like a greenhouse in there.

Boarding complete, the train moved out on time at 8am, and we were introduced to the cabin crew, Bruce and Patrick. It must take a certain type of person to do their job, dealing with people of all nationalities with their individual quirks and needs, and these guys have the right qualities. Coming around with the breakfast trolley, I asked what options there were. In the list he rolled out, Bruce mentioned "Freedom Pastries". What? "We used to call them Danish Pastries, but because of the dispute over Hans Island, we don't call them that any more, they're Freedom Pastries, like what the Americans did with Freedom Fries when the French wouldn't help them in Iraq."

Further questioning dragged me into the somewhat tongue-in-cheek international border dispute between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island. Bruce appeared to get quite heated over it. "The Danes, they keep invading Hans Island. Hey, you're English, right? You should be helping us, you still owe us from One and Two. You could get us some of those Harriers, we need those cos there's no place to build a runway on Hans Island. Hey Patrick, this guy doesn't believe the Brits still owe us from One and Two. What kind of nick are those Harriers in anyways?" And so on, down the carriage, always funny, mostly slightly close to the bone ("You're a farmer? What do you farm? Any of that Mary Jane?").

The fog burned off quite quickly, and the day was another sunny and gorgeous one. Bruce read out the itinery for the approximately 460 mile journey to Prince George, but it was all a bit much to take in, especially when we were plunged straight into the spectacular scenery of the Coastal Mountains and the Skeena River, from which the train gets its name.

And that's it, really, for the next 460 miles. Trees, lakes, mountains. Mostly trees though. They never seem to leave you (pun not intended). Most of the time they're quite close to the track, but when there's a gap the scenery causes a mass fumbling for cameras... usually too late, as by the time you're ready to take a picture, the trees have closed back in again.

There was plenty of leg and arm room available on the train, even in economy class, and with the sun pouring in through the windows I soon nodded off (I usually do on trains). I woke when we stopped for about ten minutes to let a train pass the other way, and Sandra and I disembarked to stretch our legs along with a number of other passengers. We were at an altitude of about 2000 feet, halfway up British Columbia, and already the temperature was in the high twenties. It got higher later; most of the day was in the low to mid thirties.

Back on the train and the journey continued, with a few stops along the way, which surprised me; I thought we were only stopping at Prince George. It turns out that this is actually still a passenger train, and not just a tourist attraction. In fact we're travelling almost 700 miles over two days for approximately £80 each, which isn't bad.

The railway winds its way through the Coastal Mountains, then pushes on to the Interior Plateau, which is just another excuse - were one needed - for more trees. It was here that we saw first hand the effects of the Mountain Pine Beetle. An infestation of these beetles can kill a pine tree in a fortnight, and in the past this was an accepted part of nature, because every winter the terrible freezing temperatures they get in northern Canada would kill off lots of the beetles, keeping their population in check. The problem is that recently the winters haven't been getting cold enough, and the Mountain Pine Beetle population is increasing and causing a real problem for the pine trees in large parts of British Columbia.

The journey continued, the constant trees driving people to read books, watch videos on laptops, sleep... Occasionally Bruce would speak over the intercom and draw attention to a feature of the landscape, or an animal (saw my first moose - not a wild one though), or tell an anecdote about the line (like the crew who turned up one freezing morning to blast some rock away for the railroad and found their nitroglycerin explosive too cold to use, so they warmed it up in a pan first... 12 of them died, along with their foreman, in the ensuing explosion).

At one point, two hours out from Prince George, the landscape did change, and for the first time in what seemed like days I saw carpets of rolling fields, beautiful grass-greenery stretching out over the plateau... but then the trees came back, along with one of the biggest lumber mills in the world.

After a solid hour of close up trees, 13 hours and 460 miles since we set off, we finally arrived in Prince George. Bags unloaded, we walked the short distance to our hotel and checked in (no hookers, Jeff).

Tomorrow should be a shorter journey to Jasper. Must remember to put our watches forward an hour - we're crossing into a different timezone.

Day 11 - Prince Rupert

This morning dawned a little overcast. I was expecting that. Every picture of Prince Rupert I've ever seen on the internet has shown a town cloud-covered and grey. We're about as far north as Newcastle upon Tyne here, I wasn't expecting the best of weather. Still, we chanced it, both putting on our shorts.

Breakfast was the usual, Sandra going for cereal, me going for something with eggs and bacon in it. And toast. And hash browns. The coffee in Canada is usually the good stuff, so I drink it black. They always come round and refill your mug too, no messing.

After breakfast we left the hotel and tried to find the VIA train station ready for tomorrow's trip on the Skeena Train. The map from the hotel lobby and the map in my Moon travel guide both pointed us down Bill Murray Drive (not that Bill Murray, this one). Sure enough the train was there, but the station next to it was all boarded up. It turns out that the station is now near the BC Ferries terminal where we were dropped last night. Good job we checked that out, I wouldn't have wanted us to have found ourselves standing outside a disused railway station with our suitcases at 7 am tomorrow.

We headed on into the centre of Prince Rupert. The conversation went something like this:

"What day is it?"
"I don't know."
"Is it Tuesday?"
"Tuesday? Er..."
"I think it's Tuesday."

To my mind, that's the sign we're having a good holiday.

The sun was trying to break through but it was still cloudy, so we spent some time in the Prince Rupert Museum of Northern British Columbia, which told the story of this town. Prince Rupert is on an island called Kaien Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River. For about 5,000 years the First Nation tribes lived in this area, hunting salmon and sea otters, trading dried fish and furs with other tribes for berries and meat. The arrival of fur-hungry Europeans upset that whole balance, and soon the sea-otters were extinct and the native tribes had moved to reservations elsewhere. When it was decided that a railroad link was needed to northern British Columbia to promote growth and improve the movement of timber into the mainland interior, lengthy surveys of the coastline were carried out, and the Prince Rupert area was chosen as the terminus. A base camp was established in 1906, and men and supplies were shipped out. They built a dock, living quarters, offices, a plank roadway, and soon a town was born. By the time the railway arrived in 1914, Prince Rupert already had its own local governing body. Like a lot of the towns we've seen on the coastline, Prince Rupert might have disappeared if not for the World Wars; during those conflicts the need for lumber increased enormously, and the future of the town was assured.

By the time we left the museum, the sun was blazing down. We made our way to the Cow Bay area of town, which used to be a salmon and halibut unloading and processing area, but which now holds shops and cafés. We ate a lunchtime muffin and had a coffee overlooking the seafront, then headed back to our hotel to drop some things off.

If you had told me earlier this year that I would find myself sitting on the shore front in cloudy old Prince Rupert, wearing shorts, rubbing sun lotion on, and relaxing to read a book, I would have laughed. Nevertheless that's what we ended up doing, chilling out in the sunshine (because sitting on our bums for 15 hours on a ferry yesterday really took it out of us). Prince Rupert has been lovely, far more than I expected from this part of the journey. I'm sure a lot of that has been down to the beautiful weather, but the scenery has helped, and so has the peace and quiet.

We ate Italian tonight. "So, you're visiting from England?" asked the proprietor. He's the first one to identify us as English.

Another early start tomorrow. The train leaves at 8 am. We'll be leaving the coast behind for the first time in a week and a half. In two days we'll be in the Rockies. At least then we'll get a break from these pine trees.

Day 10 - The Pacific Rim

There are no two ways about it, getting up at 4am is a crime against nature. The ferry wasn't due to sail until 07:30, but check in time was two hours before, the same as an airport. By the time we'd finished our ablutions, it was coming up on 5am, and the darkness was leeching out of the sky. We dragged our suitcases out into the carpark of the hotel, and dead on time, at 05:10, an old yellow school bus pulled up with some more tired people in it. We loaded our suitcases, loaded ourselves, and set off towards the ferry terminal, the day brightening rapidly, a lovely blue sky overhead.

The bus dropped us off at the ferry terminal where our ferry, the MV Northern Expedition, was already waiting, its great bow door lifted up to reveal the cavernous vehicle deck. We checked in, waited only half an hour, then were allowed to board. We took a lift to the 4th floor and the Purser's Office where we picked up the keys to our inside berth cabin, surely the best $85 I've spent on this holiday. We were able to dump all our baggage and go for an exploratory walk around this huge ferry.

The Northern Expedition was commissioned by BC Ferries and joined the group in 2009 in time for the summer season. At an average speed of 19 knots, the Northern Expedition covers the 272 nautical miles from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert in about 15 hours. The vessel accommodates 600 passengers and 130 vehicles. There are two restaurants, cinema facilities, lounges and seating areas, and 55 "staterooms" or cabins, of which we'd got one.

We were eating breakfast (scrambled eggs, Canadian bacon, hash browns and toast, with a slice of orange on the side so we didn't get scurvy) when the ferry slipped its moorings five minutes early, and began to steam (diesel?) its way out of Port Hardy. We finished breakfast and made our way to Deck 7 to watch the port town vanish slowly into the distance. The sky was blue, the air crystal clear and fresh, the scenery, as ever, glorious and pine-covered. We watched together for a while, saw a lone killer whale blowing and waving its dorsal fin in a last goodbye from Port Hardy, then Sandra went back to the cabin to catch up on some of the 14 hours sleep she requires every day.

I remained on deck, at the back (aft) of Deck 7, on my own for the most part. A lot of people seemed to have retired somewhere to doze, though there were a few people in the seating area below me on Deck 6. I found a plastic chair of my own and sat watching the scenery change.

After about an hour I got up and walked to the starboard side of the craft. The Canadian mainland had appeared, huge and expansive, stretching out into the impossible distance. On the port side the tip of Vancouver Island slid away, and there was a sight I'd longed to behold. Just a line really, a straight line between sea and sky. Nothing remarkable in itself, you might think. This was my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean on the planet. At that latitude there's nothing else until you get to Russia. On the one side of me I had the second largest country on the planet, on the other I had the largest ocean. It was an emotional moment.

I watched for a long time, frankly awed at the spectacle around me. I've never seen anything like it, a landscape of such size and grandieur. On the plains of Alberta you are aware of great distance until the ground is taken away from you; here the ground keeps throwing up another mountain, and another, and another. It sounds odd, but the distance never stops. You might almost believe the world is flat.

In the end, physically tired and emotionally battered, I went back down to the cabin and caught up on some sleep myself.

A couple of hours later we were both up on Deck 7 again. We had turned into the Inside Passage itself now, threading our way between the Canadian mainland and the islands that dot the coast here. The landscape was ever changing; now close, a wall of fir trees, now distant, with rolling hills, and now with snow-capped mountains. Small lighthouses are dotted around the dangerous areas, and occasionally - very occasionally - we came across small townships. Lumber towns for the most part - the British Columbian forests provide 25% of North America's lumber needs, and the industry generates about $10 billion annually, more than all of the province's other industries combined.

The weather was so good that they announced a bbq on Deck 6, so we had a lunch of hotdog (Sandra) and smokey (me) in the two chairs we'd now commandeered in the aft area of Deck 7. After lunch we sat and read for ages in the sunshine, then I got talking to an interesting Chinese-born American who was on holiday from Seattle with his wife ("You're English? How come you're wearing a Canadian hat?" "To keep the sun off my head.").

Sunburn becoming a problem, we retreated to our cabin for a little while, then returned to aft Deck 7 to watch the ferry enter Granville Channel, the narrowest part of the Inside Passage. It was 6:30pm, we'd been on the go for eleven hours and were now four hours from Prince Rupert. We went back to the restaurant for something to eat, and then I had a shower and a shave in the well-appointed cabin, not because I had to, but because I could (well okay, I did have to).

By the last hour of the journey the scenery had again battered us into submission. The sun was just setting, turning the landscape green and gold, as the ferry turned into Prince Rupert harbour and docked. We caught a taxi to our hotel ("How much?" "Eight bucks." "Hell, I'm not going to haggle with that."), and got to our room not 25 minutes ago, at 11:15pm (I'd typed most of this blog up on the ferry).

Now it's time for a beer and a relax I think. We're staying in Prince Rupert tonight and tomorrow night, so I reckon a day of mooching and laundry is in the offing.

Day 9 - If The Holiday Ended Here...

After a fairly grim but not inedible breakfast at Port McNeill, we checked out of our cheesily-named Haidaway hotel and into a drizzly, depressing morning. By the way, if I was rough on Port McNeill yesterday, it's only because it's there to be rough to. The town has no pretentions, it's a place to go to if you're getting a ferry somewhere else. I will say that the air was sparklingly clean and refreshing, and our hotel, though wanting from the outside, was perfectly fine on the inside, with a fantastic room, and staff who were friendly and helpful to an individual. I would stay there again. Just not for a weekend.

Our first port of call was that world famous burl. "You'd think something that size would just leap out at... oh my gosh." It's enormous. It must be 13 feet tall.

Photo op complete, we drove on through the rain to Telegraph Cove.

It wasn't far, and by the time we got there the rain had stopped, though there was still low cloud over the hillsides. I thought that Telegraph Cove might be a little town, but it's not, it really is a cove, and the only buildings there are a few holiday cottages and those housing the few on-season businesses that operate here. Off-season, Telegraph Cove has a population of 4.

We checked in at Stubbs Island Whale Watching Tours to make sure they were expecting us and to pay for our tickets, then had a coffee in the only coffee shop (there's a restaurant too, but we didn't go in that). The recommendation was for layers of clothing to keep warm, so we went back to F and got a couple of extra tops to put over what we were already wearing, and by the time we got back the morning whale watching boat was arriving. Everyone on it looked frozen. As they disembarked, the people waiting for the afternoon session (ours) were asking the same question; "did you see any killer whales? Did you?"

Word came back that no killer whales had been seen. A humpback, but no killers. People looked disappointed. I was thinking, "a humpback? You've seen a HUMPBACK WHALE? And you're disappointed?"

After a short wait, the captain of our boat introduced himself, gave us a short safety talk, then got us onboard. We chugged slowly out of Telegraph Cove, then out into Johnstone Strait. Straight away there was talk of a humpback, and sure enough, after only a few minutes we could see the plume of water that was the whale's blow. Christie, our resident naturalist, told us how we could expect to see between 4 and 7 blows, then the whale would dive. That's exactly what happened; four, five, six blows, then a roll of the back, an almost contemptuous flick of the tail, and the whale was gone for anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes. And no one knew where it would come back up; everyone was scanning all around the boat looking for that tell-tale blow.

I should point out here that whale-watching is done in a sensitive manner by these professional companies. It's not a case of racing to the last reported sighting, then following the whale until it's exhausted. No whale is followed for more than 30 minutes, the boat is never put in front of the whale, always a safe distance to one side (safe for the whale, that is), and engines are turned off so as not to disturb it.

We followed the humpack for a while, then reports were coming in of a family of killer whales. Apparently these are familiar visitors to Telegraph Cove, and regularly return when the salmon return. The captain turned the boat around to give the humpback some respite, and chugged very slowly over to where the killer whales had been sighted. Through binoculars I could make out dorsal fins, three of them, and this tallied with what Christie the naturalist was telling us we should expect; part of a greater family, two adult males and the "aunt" who had adopted them after their mother died.

Our boat putted slowly closer, not wishing to alarm the whales, not wishing to disturb them from what they were doing (which appeared to be hunting salmon). I had thought, prior to our holiday, that the strait would be awash with Orcas, rolling and jumping out of the sea to order. It's not like that. The one I saw throwing itself out of the water on our trip over from the mainland was an exception. You rarely see more than a blow and a dorsal fin, perhaps with a hint of back or tail. It was almost - almost - disappointing, until the whales changed direction slightly, moving closer to the boat as a trio, drawing gasps and cries and even the odd "r-sum!" from the people on board. It was a really special time, and I know it was everything Sandra had wanted out of the trip, her face was a picture.

Then, another humpback had been spotted, so we left the family of killer whales at last, and tracked the second humpback over a choppier sea, bouncing and rocking in the waves, until the captain decided enough rough stuff was enough. He took us in to some calmer water, round some of the archipelago that dots the Strait, and we saw Stellar Sea Lions, and a bald eagle, and some bull kelp, which can grow as much as 16 cms a day in warm weather, and is kept afloat by spheres of weed filled with enough carbon dioxide to kill a chicken (not sure who tested that last fact out - must have been an interesting task).

If it hadn't been for the wildlife, the scenery would have been enough; island after island, pine-covered of course, rolling mountains in the distance in either direction... I felt I could see for a hundred miles.

Eventually the trip was over, and the captain brought us in, salt-stained, sun-burned, wind-blasted, to the Cove we had left four hours earlier. Tired but happy, we made our way back to F, and typed the address of our next hotel into the sat nav. It had been a good relationship, the love-triangle between ourselves, F, and the sat nav, but now it was coming to an end.

The drive to Port Hardy was a short one. Uneventful? Hardly. Rounding a long, sweeping right-hand bend we came upon a smallish black bear eating grass by the roadside. It seemed almost small-fry after seeing two humpbacks and a family of killer whales, but it wasn't at all, and I looped back for Sandra to get some pictures of it.

We checked into our hotel, dropped our baggage off, then took F to Port Hardy airport where we dumped him unceremoniously because there was no one at the National Car Rental desk. In fact there seemed to be no one anywhere. The only person I actually saw was a member of the ground crew in a hangar. I phoned for a taxi ("Name?" "Murphy." "Aren't you the guy who invented that law?" "No, that was my dad."), we got back to the hotel, and had a fantastic meal of duck breast and spatzl in the restaurant next door.

If the holiday ended here, neither of us would be disappointed, it's been absolutely fantastic so far. But we're not even half-way through!

Tomorrow we catch the ferry north to Prince Rupert. Early start - need to check in at 5:30am, ugh.

Day 8 - Campbell River and Points North

This morning before we left Port Alberni, I decided to fill F up with fuel; he was down to a quarter of a tank, and we had about 4 hours of driving to do. Now for some people, filling up a new car with fuel in a different country is no big deal, but for me it's a major situation. The pumps work differently, the method of payment is different, even the petrol caps aren't the same (F doesn't have one, just the flap and a spring-loaded cover).

I drove over to the (very quiet) petrol station across the road from the hotel, and studied the instructions. "Insert credit card here". Right. "Remove credit card". Okay. Pause. "Credit card not valid, pay inside". Damn.

The girls inside told me that sometimes non-Canadian credit cards don't work on those systems. "And you're American, right?" "Er... no, English."

So I filled up and paid as I would at an English petrol station, and we were off. One thing, though; whenever I pull the fuel nozzle out of the tank after refuelling in England, there's always a little dance as I try to avoid the last drips of fuel out of the end of the nozzle (like when you go for a pee, eh, blokes?). Over here, no, that never happens. It's the little things like that which I enjoy.

I knew we had a fairly long journey, and I also knew that our destination, Port McNeill in the north part of Vancouver Island, didn't have a lot of things for us to do. So my plan was to stop off about half-way at Campbell River. And that's what we did.

We drove for a couple of hours, the traffic dropping off to the level I was expecting yesterday, i.e. not very much. The road reminded me of the drive up to Peace River we did in 2008; black worm-trails of tarmac snaking their way over the surface of the roadbed, signs of construction repairs after this and previous winters; the trees, the ubiquitous trees, marching alongside us all the way... over a bridge, I looked down expecting to see a gushing river or stream, instead just more trees. Occasionally the wooden trees are shaved away and replaced with metal ones, great squat pylons carrying electricity across this island.

As we entered Campbell River I noticed a Ford dealership, so I pulled in to see if they had any... wheel trims? "You mean hub caps?" Ah, they call them that over here too. They didn't have any, but they directed me to Canadian Tire [sic]. They had some, but not Ford originals. Not wanting to disappoint me, one of the guys behind the counter tried to direct me to a scrap yard where I might find some genuine Ford parts. "You guys... are you from town?" "No, we're from England." "Oh, well, do you have GPS?" In the end I decided to forego the scrap yard option; I'll just have to put up with a spanking from National Car Rental tomorrow when I turn F in.

We drove around to the harbour area of Campbell River and parked up. The weather was gorgeous, and we walked out onto the Discovery Pier, looking out over where the Strait of Georgia becomes Discovery Passage (pretending not to look for whales in case we were disappointed. We were disappointed). There were people strolling along the pier, people sitting on it, people fishing from it.

Overheard conversation:

Young lad: "One time I came fishing with french fries, and threw them in as bait."
Old timer: "... did that getcha anything?"
Young lad: "No. I wish I had some french fries now though, I'd throw them in."

Can't argue with that sort of logic.

We bought salmon and salad wraps as thick as your arm (Campbell River is known as the Salmon Capital of the World) and ate them in the glorious sunshine with a view as beautiful as you could wish for, looking out over the Discovery Passage to Quadra Island and the snow-capped mountains of the mainland beyond. After lunch we promenaded around the town for a while, then got back into F and carried on our journey up Highway 19 to Port McNeill.

My Moon BC travel book says this about Highway 19 north: "Passing through relatively untouched wilderness, with only logged hillsides to remind you of the ugliness humanity can produce with such ease, it's almost as though you've entered another world, or at least another island". I found it just so. It's one of the most staggering journeys by car that I've ever undertaken. Vancouver Island takes scenery, landscape, countryside and wilderness and smashes you over the head with it, then rubs it, pine-scented, into your face. The forests are never-ending, fighting with the snow to cover the mountain-tops. The road plunges up and down in great, long waves, such that sometimes you feel like you're falling into a sea of tree tops, only to burst out of the other side, climbing, climbing... on and on it goes, battering you in the gut with amazing view after amazing view, far too much to squeeze into a camera lens, almost too much to fit into your eyes.

The traffic was almost non-existent. For the greater part of the journey there was nothing on my side of the road, and only occasionally vehicles coming the other way. It's a strange and lonely feeling.

We made it to Port McNeill about 5pm. We were checked in by a friendly Asian girl, who wanted to know if we were German.

"No, we're English."
"The Germans speak such good English. Where did you guys learn to speak English?"
"Errr... England? Because we're English? It's our language!"

As I'd suspected, Port McNeill (population 2,600) doesn't have a lot going for it. There's a nice harbour area, and the world's largest burl, but really all we're using it for is a stop-off point prior to our whale-watching trip tomorrow.

I'd like to say Sandra is excited at the prospect, but she's been fast asleep for the last hour.