2025 Northbound Tour, Part Two

Bellingham to Burns Lake, BC

We set out early on June 21, only ninety minutes away from the Canadian border. First stop: Bellingham, WA where Daphne finally found the best coffee she’d had since leaving Utah. Fueled up and nervous, we headed toward the border crossing at Sumas.

I’m not sure what happens to us when we cross international lines by car, but if you saw us, you would have thought it was our first day on the planet. We both become frantic that somehow, we are suddenly doing something that violates international law. I drank so much coffee in the forty minutes it took us to get from Bellingham to the border that mistakes were made, commercial entry was attempted, and we ended up having to walk into the box of shame to declare ourselves, our intentions, and prove our car wasn’t stolen. Once we met their approval, they declared they don’t stamp American passports and sent us on our way, unsupervised into the Great White North with no cell service, only printed Google Maps, and no idea wtf a kilometer was.

We learned that one hundred kilometers per hour sounds fast but is painfully slow. Our car’s digital speedometer didn’t even bother to convert for us, and the tiny secondary numbers were useless to me. We spent that entire first day doing math and struggling to obey the rules of the road. Somewhere along Route 97, I wondered...“How many songs wouldn’t exist without miles?” Kilometers just don’t hit the same in a chorus.

By mid-afternoon, our jokes had dried up. Hours passed in silence, the road unfurling into the majestic forests of British Columbia. As we climbed higher into the hills, Daphne worried she might get an aneurysm from the altitude, but when we looked, the elevation was only 748 feet. Sea-level had made her soft. We stopped for gas four times, tried the coffee at Tim Hortons (bad), got the first of many honey crullers (so good), and even took a spectacularly wrong turn that sent us off-roading through backcountry gravel. Whether it was miles or kilometers, the road was surely going on forever. By the end of the day we had only traveled 672 miles in fourteen hours, the exact amount of time it took me to cover 848 miles alone on Day One. So much for “making great time.” (Foreshadowing fulfilled.)

Finally, we rolled into Burns Lake, British Columbia. We sat on the edge of the day with grass-fed A&W burgers in hand, and watched the horizon glow and the sun set later than either of us had ever seen. Day Two was complete. Northbound, but nowhere near done.