In which our heroine and her belovedest supervillain take a leisurely scenic drive to visit our fair neighbors to the north, in which they arrive at the charming B&B which will serve as their Lair for the weekend, in which Jean-Claude Mamut does indeed issue hir blessing upon the proceedings, and in which they encounter Quebecois musicians and try not to fangirl all over them. Much.
This was pretty much the most relaxing drive we’ve ever had getting to Canada, hands down. Dara and I weren’t rushed leaving the house today; in fact, we didn’t get out of the house until 2, and even then we had to stop to get lunch and run a couple of errands before we finally got on the highway. The beauty of it was, though, that we didn’t actually stay on the highway for long! We veered off to take the scenic route that ultimately led us to the Sumas crossing into Canada. And for the most part we had lovely open country to drive past, with lots of fields and hills and cows.
We drove through several small towns of the variety of “blink and you miss ’em”–one called Nooksack (which, presumably, is the sack you carry your Nook in, but that’s my BACKPACK and I suppose you can’t name a town Backpack, now can you?), and another, I swear to gods, called Acme. I had no idea we had an Acme, WA. We passed a general store on the way through there. Presumably that’s where the Coyote orders all his gear from, but we didn’t stop to go in and check.
We did however see several cows, as I mentioned. I’m pretty sure however that the large inflated one we drove past was not a typical example of the breed.
I did NOT, sadly, get a pic of the Bob’s Burgers we drove past heading into Sumas, WA. That place however did look classier than the one Paul’s a fan of!
The Sumas crossing was not nearly as huge and crowded as Peace Arch is. We were FINE with that. Dara accidentally got into the lane for campervans and trucks, but the border guy didn’t give us any trouble for that. He just asked us the standard “what brings you to Canada, how long will you be staying, where did you come up from?” questions, and let us go our merry way.
Once we got into Canada proper we stopped in Chilliwack to run a couple more brief errands–and despite the temptation being high, did NOT stop at the Timmy’s we passed. Needful noises WERE made, but alas, we HAD just had fast food lunch! But at some point before we head south again, oh, there will be Timbits. SUCH TIMBITS WE WILL HAVE.
Anyway, we got here with reasonably little trouble. Harrison Hot Springs is teeny tiny, a little resort town nestled up next to a lake and surrounded by foothills of various shapes, sizes, and stages of cragginess. The place is lovely. So is our B&B. There are neat little nooks and crannies all around the cottage we’re staying in, and we even have some nifty sculpture right outside our window. Also, and this is important to observe, Jean-Claude Mamut gave hir blessing to the room!
Once we unpacked we went out to explore. For values of “explore” meaning “walk along the lake a bit, check out all the various little restaurants and shops, and come back again”, but hey! With a gorgeous lake view like the one we had before us, the walk was pretty amazing.
And here, O Internets, is where the best part of the evening comes in. So we’re here to see De Temps Antan, right? The entire point of this excursion?
Guess who we bumped into as they were heading into one of the restaurants to get dinner. 😀
We didn’t detain them long–’cause, well, y’know, the boys had to eat–but we did stop to say hi. I introduced myself as Angela and introduced Dara as my wife, noted that I follow them on Facebook and I’m the girl who plays flute, and that Dejah Leger had asked me to say hi! André Brunet, when I told him I was playing some of his tunes, was all “oh no don’t play those, those are terrible”, hee.
And I also told them Dara plays bouzouki and told Dara that she should be watching Éric. Dara, being Dara, promptly told the good M. Beaudry, “Anna says you play bouzouki better than your brother!” I promptly scolded “DON’T TELL THEM THAT”, while the boys all chortled, pretended to reach for their phones, and asked if they could record that and post it to Facebook.
Categorically and for the record this would be me not sayin’ NOTHIN’ about NOBODY who may or may not be a better bouzouki player than his brother. (But if I were to say such a thing, Dara did point out later on the walk that I could also make an argument for other brothers who shall remain ENTIRELY NAMELESS being handsomer.) (Not that I’m saying anything about that, either!)
Anyway, we told them we were looking forward to the show tomorrow and promptly left them alone so they could have dinner, and we headed off to explore how far we could go around the lake!
There’s a nice bit of path that follows the lake around a ways. We passed some floodgates (with a sign warning that nobody was allowed to interfere with them in any way), and a bit of what looked like old rockfall.
The path eventually led around to what looked like an old processing house for water out of the spring. The sign posted next to it said that there’d been a bathhouse there at one point but that it burned down in 1905. Still, the place serves to pump water out to various springs and pools in the resort. And we could peek in and see the pumps. I swear it looked like a BioShock level in there.
On the way back we peeked at various shops again, and happily tried out the jacuzzi in our room. Because our room has a jacuzzi, Internets! This B&B is awesome.
More tomorrow! Stand by for the first of two De Temps Antan concert reports! \0/ And those of you who follow me on Facebook, the full set of pics I’m taking will be going up there. For those of you who don’t follow me on Facebook, I’m deploying them to Flickr right over here!
editing to add
- 9/14/2020: Moving the pics for this trip off of Flickr and to this site! You can find the new full gallery here.
- 11/8/2024: Ported this post over to my newer site, angelakorrati.com. Pictures lightly edited accordingly, to fix their URLs, and also to convert them to native WordPress images instead of galleries.