CANADA MOTORCYCLE TRIP - 2024

AAAARG, Matey

Last summer my riding partner, Sam, and I made an eight day trip through British Columbia up to Stewart, B.C. and then over to Heider, Alaska. We enjoyed our Canadian experience so much that we decided to try it again although with a shorter three-day trip. Our original plan was to depart late July but the weather was exceedingly hot and partner, Sam, does not tolerate the heat well so we postponed. Sam saw what he thought was a good weather window so we rescheduled to depart Friday, August 23^rd.

We rolled from Sam’s house a little after 6:00 am and proceeded up Hwy 95 in Idaho. The weather was nice but cool, in the 50’s as we proceeded north. Our first stop was for a geocache south of Coeur d’ Alene called “AAAAG, Matey” (see photo). It was located tucked into the end of a guardrail. At Coeur d’ Alene we jogged west to Hwy 41 and headed north up through Rathdrum. Hwy 41 terminates on the WA line just south of Oldtown, ID. Instead of traveling up Hwy 20 in WA which is the main highway we crossed the Pend Oreille River and traveled a beautiful little paved road that ran along the east side of the river. Eventually the road veered east and took us along Sullivan Lake before turning back west and joining the main Hwy 31 just north of Metaline Falls. We crossed the border without incident and continued north on what was now Hwy 6. At Nelson we turned west on Hwy 3A over to South Slocan where we turned north on Hwy 6 (not connected to the other Hwy 6 we had been traveling). This was a beautiful (I may overuse this word) road and we picked up a couple of geocaches along the way. One was at a Rest Area that had been closed due to a forest fire. Although the cache had been disabled we found it anyway which had been spared from the fire because in was in a tree break about four feet off the ground. This route took us up to Nakusp where we had stayed on our previous trip but approached from the opposite direction. This is a beautiful postcard picture town located on the banks of the Columbia River which is so wide at this point it looks like a lake. We had a nice dinner in town and our motel was nothing fancy but nice enough.

Ferry at Farquier

As the motel had no breakfast we bought some things in the grocery store and had breakfast in the room. We rode south along the Columbia River to Faquier where we crossed on an open ferry. It was rigged with three cables on each end anchored to the bank and it would winch itself back and forth. It just operated on the half hour and we had a little wait. We were second in line and there were probably 15 or 20 vehicles on the ferry when we crossed. We had crossed this same ferry before in the opposite direction. We rode northwest of Hwy 6 up to Vernon which must have had ten red lights timed so you had to stop at each one. (to be continued) M/W