Canada — British Columbia

When you leave the Banff and Jasper Parks driving west, you drop down out of the Rockies into the interior of British Columbia, which has several more mountain ranges and valleys, although none to match the grandeur of the Rockies. We stopped in Radium Hot Springs for lunch, but decided against taking the waters. We passed through small town after small town, rarely big enough to have a supermarket. It got warmer and drier and the ground got dusty, which was a big plus for Menominee, who loves to roll and squirm in the dust — so far, she says, Canadian dust is her favorite. The dryness — drought, actually — was also evident in forest fires, whose smoke we saw. For a whole day we drove north to escape smoke from fires burning down in Washington — the sun filtered to a dull, bloody, red disk, and twilight was a vivid peach.

As we drove south and west, crossing barren stretches, we aimed for Nelson, where mail from the US awaited at General Delivery. Nelson is a neat place, an authentic old town with Victorian buildings (it's where Steve Martin's film "Roxanne" was shot) that has survived its roots in mining and timbering and become a lively place to visit. It's located next to a narrow lake in the valley between two steeply wooded mountains — kind of like a Scottish loch or a Norwegian fjord — and its downtown area is alive with organic restaurants, street musicians, and a Tarot card reader. (Its spriit is the closest to Uptown Minneapolis we've seen since we left the Twin Cities.)

South of Lytton we stopped and indulged in the Hell's Gate tram ride ($11) down into the Thompson River canyon where the rock walls narrow and the river flows swiftly (twice the flow of Niagra Falls, they claim). The tram ride was fun, the salmon in the cafe was delicious, the gift shop enticed us to spend thirty dollars, and the walk across the suspension bridge was free. (Recommended, because it's a welcome relief from the tedium of driving across barren stretches).

In Minnesota, the spare water just sits in lakes, over ten thousand of them scattered everywhere. Here in BC, the water is confined by the mountainous terrain to run down into the valleys in streams and rivers into lakes. Some of the lakes are pretty big, great for recreation; some were created by hydro-electric dams, including the Bennett Dam west of Fort St. John, which I toured. So powerful are its ten generators that it alone supplies a quarter of BC's demand for electricity — and of course, it doesn't pollute. Yay hydro-electric!

Eventually, as we worked our way near Vancouver, dry and dusty gave way to a more pleasant, humid air, and we realized, as early explorers must have, that we were smelling the sweet breeze from the Pacific Ocean.