Husband and I like to take drives, so yesterday that’s just what we did.  We started at home (Vancouver), and then took a drive through West Vancouver, which was my first time going there.  Husband was nearly incapacitated by my comment, made innocently and without a trace of irony, that I thought it would be perfectly acceptable for us to buy a place in West Van some day (humour explained for non-natives: this is the rich part of the city, peopled by uber snobs who drive Maseratis and stare down their noses disapprovingly at mere plebes like me).  It would be like saying, Gee dear, I guess I could see my way to living in Trump Palace, if I had to.

Okay.  Anyway.  We made a brief detour to check out lighthouse park, which is where well scrubbed and clean looking West Vancouver dogs go to run around with their equally clean owners:

I took a picture of this plaque not because I’m particularly interested in Captain Vancouver, but because of the special attention paid to the birth of the first white child born here.  West Vancouver’s snobbiness has a pedigree reaching back to the first whiteys I guess (fourth paragraph):

Then we went to Whistler, future home of the winter Olympics and also a haven of snobbiness.  By the time we got there it was three in the afternoon and I hadn’t had any lunch yet, so I was beastly.  And so was this nifty scultpure of skulls!  (Sorry for the bad segue.):

Whistler is actually quite nice, and thus ends the nice portion of our driving day, because we just kept heading north and let me tell you, there is nothing up there but little butt towns full of houses with cars in the yards and not much else.  We drove up to Lilloett, then on to Lytton, Boston Bar, and then looped back through Hope to Chilliwack and finally home.

The towns are ghastly but the landscape is spectacular, but alas I only got bad pictures of it because, as I say, no one lives up  there and clearly highway maintenance is neither prioritized nor, perhaps, possible.  Long chunks of the road are right up against obvious avalanche and slide prone banks.  You can tell because a) there are signs saying so and b) there are rocks littering the road that plainly came from the slide bank on the left.  On the right is a steep cliff down the mountains into nothing.  So there’s nowhere to stop and even if there were, you don’t want to loiter where avalanches happen!  This is a long way of saying this is the best picture I got.  Sorry.

This was one of the very few areas where they put up a barrier between the highway and the cliff.  The river was beautiful and so are the mountains - but holy shit the highway is scary.  In places it’s one lane for both direction (as in, you have to share the lane with people coming the other way!) - but because it’s the fucking BC mountains the road is twisted like a corkscrew and you can see about four metres in front of the car.  If someone was actually coming the other way, the Sprite Car (and us) would be paste.  Why was it only one lane, you ask?  Because the other lanes were all covered in rock slide material!  Ha!  Ha!  Nervous laugh!

They may be living in poverty ridden and ugly little butt towns, but the people of non-population-corridor BC are fucking hardcore.  And seriously, it is so beautiful up there it takes your breath away.  Canada is in general very sparsely populated once you get about two hundred kilometres from the USA border, and it has a vast and rugged beauty that is startling when you’re used to the ugliness of the city.

Anyway, from rich West Van to poor Boston Bar and points in between, we had about a ten hour drive through some fantastic terrain.  And despite driving all day we stayed in a rather small little corner of the province, which I must say is really enormous.

Okay.  There’s more driving on the schedule today so I need to jet.  I mean drive.  See ya!