Trip Report: October 5 through 14, 2002
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
THREE WEEKS BY LAND AND BY SEA
VANCOUVER TO SEATTLE
-OR-
HURRY UP AND WAIT
October 12, 2002
Our bags are packed and set outside our room door before 2am. We are requested to leave our cabins by 8am and await disembarkation instructions in a public area. We have tagged our luggage with the orange and white tags provided, which will help us find our bags when we disembark. We are provided with a disembarkation number, 6 in our case. We are to proceed to the gangway when our number is called, claim our bags on the pier, and go though customs inspection before checking in for our car rental.
Zaandam arrives on schedule under the Lion's Gate Bridge at 6:45am, as we finish breakfast in the Lido Dining Room. Normally, the Lido opens at 7am, but on arrival day they open one hour earlier, as they want to get us off the ship as soon as possible after arrival at the pier and clearance by Canadian Customs. Sylvia has awakened this morning with a bad cough, so we vacate our cabin at 8am and proceed to the infirmary where the ship's doctor is scheduled to be on duty from 8 to 9am. He does not appear on time, so at 8:30 I ask the nurse on duty if she can page him, which she says is impossible. (What would happen if a true emergency occurred?) I go to a phone and call the front desk and ask them to page the doctor. He arrives within two minutes, but perhaps it is just a coincidence.
While we were waiting, our number 6 was called for disembarkation. By 9am we are finished at the infirmary, where proper medication has been dispensed, and they are calling numbers 19 and 20. We pay our charges at the front desk, $122.00 USD. Rather expensive, but convenient compared to finding an urgent care center in the city. As we are leaving, an elderly male passenger is brought in on a stretcher, as he had fallen while walking the gangplank. The doctor was right there to help.
As we enter the terminal, we eventually find our luggage at the far end, as we were to be among the first off the ship. Claiming them, we force our way through the later passengers seeking their bags, in order to find the head of the customs line. After shuffling for 30 minutes through this line, we display our ID and then were asked if we were carrying any fruit. We had taken two apples to tide us over until lunch, but learned that apples grown in British Columbia cannot be taken into British Columbia. I didn't even ask why, as I turned the apples over to the agent, who stuffed them into her pocket.
This was the extent of the formalities, and we moved our luggage on the handily provided (free of charge) baggage carts. It was less than a quarter mile to the car rental desks which are conveniently located within the terminal. At 9:30am Budget was waiting for us, but we were told we must pick up our rental contract and keys at the downtown office, where we were whisked to in their van.
There was a line of about 30 people waiting to be served by three agents, one of them a trainee. We had our car delivered within an hour, at 11am, after which we proceeded to the Hotel Vancouver to pick up our two train bags which we had stored there during our cruise.
We were scheduled to depart on Amtrak's Empire Builder out of Seattle at 4:45 this afternoon. The Amtrak Thruway bus out of Vancouver was not scheduled into Seattle until 4:30pm, which would not be enough time for us to reorganize our luggage in order to check our cruise clothing back to Klamath Falls. Renting a car seemed to be a good alternative in this case. I had mapped out what seemed to be an interesting rural route along the Trans Canada Highway to Abbotsford where we would cross the border to Suma, Washington, then follow scenic State Route 9 to the vicinity of Seattle.
The Trans Canada Highway from Vancouver to Abbotsford is a four lane high speed divided highway, very similar to our Interstate Routes. It was very heavily traveled, with bumper to bumper traffic moving along at 110 kilometers per hour. The speed limit is 100 km/h with no reduction for trucks, so if you dawdled along at the speed limit, you would soon have a heavy truck breathing down your neck. There is very little rural scenery to enjoy here, although we did catch glimpses of 10,000 plus foot Mt. Baker, across the border in Washington State.
One of the greatest advantages over taking the bus is that we would not have to haul all of our baggage off of the bus at the border, through customs and immigration, then through security again before reloading our bags. There are no Red Caps at the border station. As our car idles at the Abbotsford/Suma border, the line was short and moving fast, as drivers flashed their ID cards, answered a couple of simple questions, and proceeded to the US. We had talked to an American aboard the ship who drove his RV to Canada and was detained at the border while every cabinet and every piece of his luggage was opened and examined in great detail. But our experience was very fast by comparison. Here is how it went:
"Hi folks," says the steely eyed agent, "where are you coming from?"
"We just disembarked from a Holland America cruise ship."
"Where are you headed for?", he demands, his eyes narrowing.
"To Seattle to catch a train."
"Did you buy anything?"
"Yes, this golf shirt, and my wife brought some cosmetics."
"How much did they cost?" His eyes are now mere slits.
I gave him the price, which wasn't very much.
"Take off your sunglasses and pop your trunk."
I failed the trunk test, because I nervously could not find the trunk release quickly enough on this rental car to satisfy his expectations.
"Give me your keys!" Now he is sure he is on to us.
He opens the trunk and I observe through the rear view mirror that he opens Sylvia's back pack. He finds a container of some cosmetic, sticks his unwashed finger into it, then licks his finger. It must have been pretty yucky, as he put it right back, slammed the trunk closed, and tossed me my key with a strained, "Have a nice day!" The whole procedure took less than 10 minutes, and we were back home in the good old USA, secure in the knowledge that no undesirables would ever get through that border station.
I later described the container to Sylvia, and she tells me it was a container of hair wax, something to keep help keep your hairdo in place in windy weather, such as what you find on the promenade deck of a moving ship. I was not going to taste it to find out what that poor agent had to go through. We concluded that these elite watchman of our borders are specifically trained to watch for situations outside the norm, such as tourists taking a route other than Interstate 5 to Seattle.
Route 9 wound its way through the Skagit Valley, crossing and criss- crossing a railway line that headed directly south as the crow flies. There are areas of scenic beauty, with fall colors, but the road is so twisty and winding that we could never exceed 50 mph. Every few miles there was a busy crossroad, not with a quaint café and general store, but instead with congested strip malls. We were not going to make it to Seattle in time on this road, so we crossed over to Interstate 5 and proceeded south with no delays, arriving at the King Street Amtrak Station at 3pm.
Here we organized our bags, sending our big cruise bag home to Klamath Falls and checking the remaining bags with the Red Cap, who would deliver them to our Deluxe Room D in the 830 car. Free from encumbrances, we did some shopping, and gassed up our rental car before returning it to Budget, near the Westin Hotel. The clerk at Budget said we would be glad that we filled up the tank at $1.39 per gallon, because Budget charges $4.40, which is highway robbery. (These are his words, not mine, even Budget employees think it is unfair.) It was not even necessary to call a cab as a taxi drove in delivering a Budget customer. The taxi took us to the Amtrak station, where he picked up a fare who just arrived on a Cascade. The cabby was having a good day.
We were in the waiting room with 30 minutes to spare before the departure of the Empire Builder. However the arrivals board noted that the westbound Builder did not arrive until 1:50pm. We have seen the late-arriving Canadian turned in an hour in Vancouver, but this is not possible with Amtrak, as the train has to be moved to the yards to be cleaned and restocked. So the advertised 4:30 departure has been re-scheduled to 6pm. The station personnel brought in some very good pizza and soft drinks to tide us over, so the wait was not too strenuous.
Soon after boarding at 6:00, we were served an excellent dinner in the dining car, filet mignon, grilled to order, with apple cherry cobbler and vanilla ice cream. It had been a long day, so the bed in the deluxe room was a very welcome sight indeed.
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