Day Trip to Bellingham

Having lived on the eastern side of the continent for nearly a decade, I pay much less attention to state boundaries than I ever did when I was younger. States over here are smaller and then they are not smaller, they seem to take on funny shapes. For example, Maryland and Ohio each have borders that are logically defined by rivers and illogically defined by policy that cause either themselves or their neighboring states to have weird shapes (look no further than West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle and how long, in terms of north-south, the state of Maryland is in the community of Hancock).

What is now bizarre to me is when I visit the Vancouver area and it is not just natural to end up in another state. I mean, I live six miles south of Pennsylvania and less than 30 miles west of Maryland. I drive to Maryland because they’ve got better antiquing and bulk candy options. I drive to Pennsylvania because they’ve got better breakfast choices, and the outlet mall less than an hour away makes my Quaker heart sing with consumeristic delight.

I use all of these words to preface some of the most exciting news (to me) on this entire trip: day trip to Bellingham! We’re not crossing state/provincial lines, we’re going to Washington State. That’s a national boundary. We had some bureaucratic goals, but most of them were touristic. I love Washington State. There is pretty much nothing I do not love about Washington State. I say pretty much because I am pretty bummed about the epic cluster brewing on the Seattle waterfront concerning an enormous stalled out tunnel-boring machine. Though I have endless faith in WSDOT that they’ll get through it. Frankly, I sometimes fantasize about one day having the opportunity to work at WSDOT. Once again, I digress.

Order of business: visit the Western Washington University campus, mail myself a package of childhood memories, eat some tasty lunch, find a geocache, and ogle like a small child at the very conspicuous marijuana dispensaries, return to Canada via a different route than the one we came in on merely for the sake of variety while not forgetting to top off the gas tank with some cheaper fuel.

Western Washington has a stunning campus. The topography reminded me of West Virginia University. It seemed like a hilly nightmare. I often muse that if there were a scientific rating of the best legs on a college campus, West Virginia would rank very high because it is a relentlessly hilly campus. Western Washington would give them a run for their money, especially given the fact that your average Washingtonian has a healthier lifestyle than your average West Virginian (while Business Insider isn’t science, they report the America’s Health Rankings findings and West Virginia in their top 10 least healthy states)

On the other side of the WWU campus, I found a UPS store who was happy to ship a small box of my personal belongings back to West Virginia for me. If we hadn’t desired a day trip to Washington, I’d have tolerated the higher rate to ship from Canada and the extra few days for it to sit in a warehouse at the border, but now it made no sense. Besides, it had the opportunity to be fun to surprise Chris with a package full of 20-year-old knickknacks. The store was full of all of the right, laid-back characters you’d expect to find in a college town in Washington. Kind of really made consider relocation, right then and there.

Across the parking lot we hit up the Sehome Diner for lunch. The location was ideal. Our sandwiches hit the spot and the timing worked out because the worst rain of the day seemed to decide that now was the right time to move on through. This also marks an opportune time to plot the remainder of our day. I selected the geocache I wished to seek and we settled on taking the old highway back, which meant returning to Canada via Aldergrove.

We did a little more touristing and shopping before making our way back to the central business district to a small park, which appears to have been whittled away at over the years, now being little more than an awkward traffic obstruction near the center of town. Local Meridian is a virtual cache at this point. The monument in this park indicates and describes how survey divisions work to divide and determine land ownership, which was key in the original settlement of area by non-native settlers.

Small monument describing how survey divisions work

Heading out of town, back toward the border, I was in awe at one thing I had never noticed on previous visits (which predate the current legislation which legalize marijuana in Washington State): an abundance of shops offering up the product. Each shop seemed a little cheekier than the next. While filling up the car, down the road the black and green letters of Total Health Care stood out to me, and I realized that the acronym for the facility could be substituted for something else. Clever, clever. I’m not sure how their experiment is working out. I’m not sure I was quite prepared to just see marketing for it right in front of me like that. I felt almost like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing? Perhaps that’s what the Feds actually would prefer given that I’m not a Washington State or Colorado resident?

With a full tank of gas we had no difficulty heading home. Because we planned ahead and did not cross the border at peak times, our waits were minimized. We also have a little bit of experience crossing the border. We have our documents ready when we get to the crossing and we are always up front and honest when asked any questions, even if it takes an extra few seconds to go through it all.