This week, I’ve been chilling in Point Roberts, in Whatcom County, Washington - which strangely is a suburb of Vancouver, Canada. It’s a quick drive from the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, the one we arrive in when traveling from our home on Salt Spring Island to the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.
Point Roberts is stunning and a lovely place ramble and enjoy gorgeous driftwood strewn west coast beaches. Don't miss spending a day wandering the mud flats after the tide goes way way way out in Maple Bay!
Point Roberts is the only Canadian suburb Canadian citizens need a passport to visit because it’s in the United States. It’s also one of a handful of American towns you must drive through Canada to get to. Point Roberts is a five-square-mile peninsula jetting from Canada into America, hemmed by the Salish Sea.
There are residential streets where the homes on the north side of the road are in Canada, while the ones on the south side are in the USA, with nothing in between to stop neighbors from strolling over to borrow a cup of sugar. When the tide is out, a couple can sit in side-by-side beach chairs on the mud flats with one person in the USA and the other in Canada.
In the early 80s, it was a place to come drinking and buy cheap gas, booze, and groceries. Back then, American beer was notable among Canadians for tasting like beer-flavored water. Still, it was cheap, so we didn’t care. The first time I ever got drunk was from drinking a super-sized can of American beer on the beach in Boundary Bay.
Today Canadians use Point Roberts to receive Amazon packages and other online goods. A postal box here is a hot commodity - people have to die before folks on a long waiting list can get their hands on one.
Many folks my age who grew up in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia remember partying at a rowdy local dive bar called the Breakers. I saw April Wine play there in 1983 when I was sixteen. Back then, a carload of obviously drunk underage teenagers could cross the US/Canada border with only a library card for identification.
Approximately 1,000 US citizens live here. School buses cross the local border, then travel to another border crossing so the kids can attend school in Blaine, Washington. Having a ferry to Washington State would make life more convenient for the locals, but there isn’t one.
Seventy-five percent of the homes here are owned by Canadians, who mostly use them as summer cabins. It’s the kind of place where authentically rustic cabins are passed down through the generations.
Many cottagers think the US government stashes witness protection candidates here as the new cashier at the local liquor store often has a thick Alabama drawl and full-body tattoos. Unsurprisingly, the other residents of Whatcom County refer to Point Roberts as their “orphan problem child.”
The US/Canadian border was closed for almost two years during the pandemic, a previously unimaginable situation. The closure was sudden and unexpected, so many folks could not winterize or close their cabins.
Stormy and I have US passports, so we came here and spent a week cleaning out fridges and turning off water lines. We rambled around for hours without seeing another person.
We enjoyed evenings sitting on abandoned beaches, enjoying shelf-stable snacks and unusual flavors of sickly sweet vodka coolers left long-ago abandoned by cabin guests. We were irritated by being forced to quarantine for two weeks when we returned to Canada, even though the only people we saw were each other.
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