Road Improvements

We're now half-way through the summer transportation project on the Point.  There was a lot of fear around here about what the re-paving of Tyee Drive, the main road into Point Roberts, would mean about our ability to get through the border without horrendous wait times.  The prospects of a single lane of travel in each direction (rendering our Nexus Card privileges useless) seemed pretty daunting.  As a result, I suspect a lot of us have reduced our cross-border travel as much as possible.  Certainly I have, given that this is the season when Okanagan stone fruit is available in Canada (and not in Point Roberts: could someone explain that to me given that it is incredibly fine fruit and right there?). I've been across only  twice in 15 days, and that was because my younger daughter and her two children were here this past week and had to be collected and returned to the Vancouver airport.

Now, this is a pitiful number of data points to base any generalization on, but the fact is that these two occasions, either of which could have been difficult exits from the point, were a piece of cake.  The first one, Monday, early evening, had no one in line going north but us; and the second one, the following Monday, at noon, had three cars ahead of us in line.  So, although we had allowed an extra hour for waiting at the Point Roberts border in our our airport travel schedule, we needed none of those sixty minutes.

Coming back, both occasions, equally easy, though that direction of travel is less problematic because coming from Canada we have the Nexus Card still working for us (i.e., providing a separate lane of entrance: it's only after you cross the border into Point Roberts that you get the one-lane only problem).  Not only that, but they had plenty of Roads people from the County providing good direction for people to figure out what they needed to do to get where they wanted to go.  Good work, County!  That's my experience; others may have had different ones.

Yesterday, they looked to be getting very close to laying the final asphalt covering for the border-Benson Road section.  And with that done, our border fears should be considerably lightened, although there will be yet another two weeks of bumpy travel from Benson to APA and thus to the gas stations and the International Market and the Post Office.  Particularly hard on the Canadians who may get Okanagan fruit easily in their own markets but still come here for other of life's essentials: the gas, the butter, and the internet purchases.