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Vancouver Mill Tour

We began the tour in Seattle with our first stop at Woodinville Lumber to see their wall panelization operations, and then on to Chateau Saint Michelle winery and Fritch Mill before heading to the Canadian border.  Note for the future: Don’t plan on crossing any borders on September 10 if you don’t want to take all the luggage out of the bus to go through customs—it tends to put a kink in the time schedule.  And, since we did, our scheduled ferry to take us to Victoria left with us, leaving us to wait three hours for an available one.

Tuesday, the morning was free time to explore Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, followed by a visit to Butchart Gardens, the spectacular 55 acre gardens on Vancouver Island.  That afternoon we took the ferry back to Vancouver where we spent the next two days.

We toured the facilities of i-Level by Weyerhaeuser’s Parallam Mill and Watkins Sawmills Shake and Shingle Mill on Wednesday, which were both great tours.  If you ever wondered why shakes and shingles are so expensive, you wouldn’t wonder any more after the tour—it is manually intensive and dangerous.  We also had a superb lunch at the Shake and Shingle Pub, a family-owned business in the heart of lumber country that served us a hearty fall meal.

On Thursday, we toured the Vancouver area with stops at Grouse Mountain, where we saw grizzly bears, a film about the history of British Columbia and Grouse Mountain, and watched an entertaining lumberjack show.   We also took a cruise around Vancouver Harbour, the most active harbor on North America.

Then on the last day of our tour, we headed back over the Canadian border, which went extremely smoothly, of course, since we didn’t have a ferry to miss.  We also got to participate in canine training where Salena, an explosive sniffing dog, was brought on board our bus to find an explosive devise hidden by the customs officer (in our case a CD player), which she did.  It also meant we didn’t have to leave the bus to go through customs and take all the luggage off the bus.  We loved it!  On our way to APA – The Engineered Wood Association where we learned about and got to experience weight-load testing on OSB’s, we stopped at the Museum of Flight in south Seattle.  The museum and APA were both very interesting with a lot to see and a great way to conclude the tour

It’s amazing how quickly the week went by.  I had a lot of fun and am already looking forward to next year.  For the 2008 Mill Tour, we will be staying in the United States and are researching the areas of Oregon, Idaho/Spokane, and North Carolina/Smokey Mountains.  We are planning another international tour for 2009, to either Germany or Norway.  We will send you a flyer as soon as we set dates for 2008 and 2009, so you can save the dates and plan on joining us on these fun and informational tours.