Prince George to Vancouver

Day 20 (23 Sep) — To the metropolis

to Vancouver

Our road trip, covering about 7,000 km, was finally reaching its climax. The day had come to return to Vancouver, Canada's third-largest city.

Thinking this would be the last we'd see of this peaceful Canadian countryside, a reluctance to leave welled up.

What I thought while driving in Canada is that there are so many lakes. Not only huge lakes like Great Slave Lake near Yellowknife and Great Bear Lake further north, but especially in the north it's a lake district dotted with lakes of all sizes. Heading steadily south from Prince George, near Cache Creek, the junction town for Kamloops, bare hills with sparse trees began to dominate the scenery. It didn't seem like an area with so little rain; why had it become all bare hills like this?

South of Cache Creek, Trans-Canada Highway 1 was the opposite of what we expected: a road through the mountains. There were also many tunnels, which you hardly ever see in Canada.

Closer and closer to Vancouver. In the town of Hope we passed the petrol station where, on last year's trip, the Jeep suddenly made strange noises and sprayed liquid. Fortunately on this trip we'd had no accidents, not even a scrape, and no breakdowns. I hope we can get back to Seattle safely like this, and at the end give the car a good wash at a car wash as a thank-you.

Driving on toward Vancouver, we joined Highway 5 coming from Kamloops. The road immediately got better and the land turned to plains. Towns like Abbotsford already felt like the city. Eventually the skyscrapers of downtown Vancouver came into view.

We went to the Palms Motel on Kingsway, a little away from downtown Vancouver. This motel had a completely different atmosphere from the lodgings so far. The interior had a somewhat Chinese feel, and the receptionist was Asian too. And around the motel, shops with signs in Chinese and Korean lined the streets. Streets that made you wonder whether you were really in Canada.

Until we reached Vancouver, we had checked our wallets many times, been careful not to run into money trouble, and kept economising, because we expected lodging in Vancouver to be very expensive. But the Palms Motel cost far less than expected, under 100 dollars a night. We were going to have quite a lot of money left over, and suddenly we felt generous. We had cut back on food in particular, so today we treated ourselves to a Korean barbecue restaurant. The customers were all Asian, and though I've never been, the barbecue was probably just like in Korea. The kimchi was good too, and for some reason Japanese sashimi was on the menu, so we ordered it. It was the best dinner.