The discovered country

The best part of a touring holiday is arriving at a place not in the guide books, and finding it to be beautiful and unique. I have had many such experiences. I remember a holiday in Brittany with my wife when my son Andrew was young enough to be in a pushchair. We passed through the small market town of Quintin on the way back from somewhere else, and stopped. We found streets of fine old houses and a chateau. At the chateau café, looking out on the gardens and the river, a well-dressed lady took a liking to Andrew, and fed him Madeleine cakes.

Many years later, now with an adult Andrew and an adult daughter Rosemarie, my wife and I travelled Eastwards from Vancouver. This was a quiet winding route with scenery of staggering beauty. Travel meant crossing a sequence of wooded ridges, each running North-South, with long narrow lakes in the valley floors. We travelled through EC Manning Provincial Park, Penticton, Kelowna (where we ate at an Indian restaurant whose owner was nostalgic for Birmingham), Upper Arrow Lake, and then, on the third day of travel, arrived at Nakusp. This was the perfect British Columbia village, arranged on a small grid plan, with a high street of buildings lined with the kind of wooden facades seen in wild west films.

Nakusp had once been an industrial community, but the lake had been raised and the lakeside industry had been flooded. There were now gardens and a lakeside footpath. The old Leland Hotel (built shortly after the village was established) survived, although rather closer to the lake than it once was. Built in 1892, it is ancient by BC standards. We stayed there and had a view from our bedroom window that people in Switzerland would pay thousands to see.

I wonder if the European Union has any funds for village twinning, so that people from Quintin and my own village of Martley could get to know each other? Nakusp is rather far from Martley, but I intend to visit again as a one-man twinning association.