I’ve used my passport to visit five countries. While I’ve misplaced the photos from these trips (younger me would be incensed), I still have the stories.
I’d wager most travelers from the US visit Mexico or Canada first, depending on which border they’re closer to. Living in Washington State, I visited Vancouver BC, Canada.
Driving north across the border is very chill. It took a minute to get used to the speed limits being posted in kmph. I panicked for a moment, thinking my car didn’t have that readout, before realizing it did. There’s a whole second set of numbers to look at, that for the ten years prior I’d trained myself to ignore.
The greater area around Vancouver feels very similar to the greater areas around Seattle and Portland. There’s lots of vineyards, and lots of roads on crazy inclines which are not the norm in Spokane, WA. In Vancouver proper, the street names are confusing. In my experience, cities in the US use numbers for street names along one axis, and letters for street names along the other. In Vancouver, they used numbers along both axes, so that 3rd St crossed 3rd St, and finding my way wasn’t as straightforward as I’d have liked.
I visited an English garden. Having never been to England (I’ve since spent one mind-numbingly long layover in Heathrow, which still doesn’t count), this was a treat. The detail with which the flowers were laid out in different patterns, the meticulous order, was mesmerizing. It reminded me of English desserts. And there was one plant, a Gunnera Manicata, which had such broad leaves I had to stretch my arms to their full reach to touch either edge of one. If a Venus flytrap were that big, it could have swallowed me whole.
My big plan for visiting Vancouver was going to the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park. I’m afraid of heights, but I stubbornly don’t want to let that hold me back from having interesting experiences. So when I got there, and the very first bridge was the scariest one—barely two people wide and swaying back and forth over a river far below—I swallowed and stepped onto it. I held the railing with a death grip as I inched across. I couldn’t have done much more than inch anyway; it was incredibly crowded, unlike what any of the online photos had prepared me for. Several people (mainly teenaged and young-20s boys) intentionally jolted the bridge for a laugh. Finally I made it across. After walking across two more of the higher bridges to prove to myself I could, I stuck to the lower bridges to give my poor heart a break.
There were a lot of informational signs about the huge trees which served as the support structure for the network of bridges. It was from one of these signs that I learned about heartwood. The pillar of the tree, which will not decay or lose strength, and which is in many ways as strong as steel. Clearly the concept stuck with me, as years later I adopted “Heartwood” as the section title of my paid posts for this Substack, which deal with all I’ve experienced that turned me into a survivor.
One of the employees at Capilano held an owl on his gloved hand. He explained that owls only actually sleep for about four hours a day. They keep hiding the rest of the day as other predatory birds, which see better in daylight, would attack them if they left their tree hollows while the sun is up.
I picked up some ice wine while in Vancouver, despite not being a wine person. It’s a specialty in such northern climes. The grapes are left on the vine until the weather has gone so cold they’re frozen. The resulting wine is thick and sweet. The idea of taking home something special and local like that appealed to me.
You’d think that returning to one’s home country would be easier than entering a foreign one. This is not true for US citizens. When I presented my passport for inspection by the border guard, he grilled me. He noticed I lived in Spokane, WA, so he asked me why I was crossing the border so far west, between Seattle and Vancouver.
“I-90 is almost a straight shot, east-to-west. There’s no straight highway like it north of the border.”
“Yes there is,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.
I had checked my route multiple times before leaving on this journey. I could still envision BC-3 W, the only highway he could have possibly been referring to, clearly in my mind. It was as if whoever planned it had been trying to draw an audio waveform. The border guard was dead wrong. But I’ve dealt with enough difficult people to know the futility of arguing the point. I shrugged.
“Well, that’s the way I’m going home. On I-90.”
Unable to find a reason to further hold me up, he begrudgingly let me through. I drove home on I-90, and got back to normal life.