Cross Canada Trip - On the Road Again

We left our RV Park at the Border near the U.S. and started out across the Hazelmere into the Fraser Valley. Our province, B.C., is divided into 6 regions. 1) Victoria, our Capital is a mix of quaint British charm, beautiful gardens and city hip. It’s on Vancouver Island which has lush rainforests with forests and sandy beaches. 2)Our Vancouver, Fraser Valley region enjoys coastline, rolling out through valleys to rugged mountains. We will host the 2010 Olympic and Paralympics’ Games. We drove through the Fraser Valley, past Langley, the Horse Capital here, through Abbotsford, the Raspberry Capital , into Chilliwack, a farming and dairy area including silos at the farms. Here we fueled at the Shell/Flying J at 84.9/ gallon.

B.C. was called a perfect garden of ‘Eden’ by an early explorer, James Douglas in 1842. Our first inhabitants were the native Indians, Spanish explorers in 1772, British in 1786 establishing trade, bringing the Hudson’s Bay Company controlling the fur trade by 1820. In 1871, we became the 5^th province in the Dominion of Canada and were joined to the East by a transcontinental railroad in 1885. Victoria is our Capital and we have about 4 million people here today.

We passed Hope on the Fraser River, originally a fur trading post, which really developed during the Gold Rush in 1858. We drove over the Hope Slide, an area where the side of Johnson Peak came down burying the highway under 148’ of rubble. We went up the Coquihalla where the snowsheds have bears etched in concrete. I always feel I'm on top of the world when we begin to descent down to Merritt, the country Music Capital of Canada which has a 4 day MountainFest Concert every year with world renowned stars. Downtown they have a Famous Walk of the Stars with Bronze casts of handprints of Celebrities. We pulled through the Info Center and it was so crowded we could barely park and had to inch through. 3) This is the Thompson Okanagan region although we won’t go down to the Border and Okanagan this trip. We arrived in Kamloops to 90 F. Hot!! we parked in Angus' driveway behind Chuck and Karens and had a steak feed with all the kids and grandkids. Lots of fun.