Today I saw something that sent my mind spinning in a direction that I hadn't thought about in quite a while. Does that ever happen to you? You see or hear or smell something and it reminds you of something entirely different.

Well, I saw someone on TV that made me remember a day-trip my family made to Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, about 1985 or 86.

My Sweetie has some relatives that live in northern Idaho, just below the Canadian border. We went to Idaho to visit friends and decided to look up this Aunt that my husband had never met.
We found her and her son, living in a log cabin in the forest of northern Idaho. YD was ready to move in immediately -- it was like "Little House In the Big Woods" had come to life!

We had a lovely visit and then, hearing that we had never been to Canada, cousin asked if we would like to go there. We agreed so the 6 of us piled in their car and headed north. At the border the guards knew the cousin by name -- he conducted business on both sides of the border on a regular basis. We crossed and then drove along side Kootenay Lake for a number of miles -- about an hour of travel. Kootenay is a glacial lake and is long, narrow, and deep. Finally we arrived at the ferry point and got in line in our car. When the ferry arrived and we drove on-board and began the 30 minute trip across the lake. That ferry is the longest free ferry in North America, and is for the convenience of people who live on one side of the lake so that they can visit and shop on the other side. Otherwise, the existence of this long, narrow lake would effectively divide the two areas.

After landing on the other side we drove a few miles to the town of Nelson, British Columbia.
We did a little sight seeing and then stopped in the down-town area to have lunch and to shop.
As we looked around I saw something that puzzled me. All the buildings were flying American flags! Strange -- we were in Canada.

I asked cousin for an answer to this puzzling sight and he didn't have a clue. There had always been Canadian flags in the past. We actually did see a Canadian flag in the outskirts of the town but in the down-town area, all the flags were U. S. Stars and Stripes.

The waitress in the drugstore sandwich shop provided the answer to our question. The movie, Roxann, was being filmed in Nelson and since it was supposed to be happening in an American town, they had hung the American flags. She said that it really gave her a strange feeling to see the American flags flying. I never saw Roxann, but if you did, you can know that the town shown was actually in Canada, despite the U.S. flags! I later wondered if the red, British-style phone booths were shown in the movie. At that time I would have said that no American cities or towns have those type of phone booths so that would be a dead give-away. Not so, however, in nearby Houston there is an area called the UK (Upper Kerby) and they have the red phone booths as a gimmick to attract shoppers to the area.

We drove back via the Salmo Pass, a new road that also provided access to both sides of the lake, but involved many more miles of driving. All-in-all, it was an interesting day.