We wake up early this morning so that we can get an early start on the day. Yesterday’s traffic was so busy, so we would like to avoid a lot of that today. Stop at Tim Horton’s for coffee and their English muffin egg sandwich, then we’re off. We think the smoke is a little bit better this morning, but this is the sunrise.
The traffic is light this morning. We are glad we got an early start. Here is a gallery of highway shots from the beginning to the end. You can see how thick the smoke is in the morning and how as we get closer to home it dissipates.
I was noticing signs along the highway south of the summit. These signs had Shakespearean character names. This one is a bit fuzzy, but is says “Lear”. I saw Verona, Shylock and a number of others.
As I am very curious, I googled as we drove and found this interesting article on the subject.
Anyone who has driven the Coquihalla Highway (which is to say 99 per cent of the Kamloops population with a driver’s licence) has probably wondered the same thing. What’s the story behind all those Shakespearean names?
The geographical markers can be found along the Coquihalla’s Summit-to-Hope portion – perhaps the most noticeable of these being the Portia interchange and Othello Road.
Much of the Coquihalla Highway is built upon the original rail bed of the Kettle Valley Railway, and this is where the Shakespearean references come from, although there appears to be a discrepancy among historical records as to who actually deserves credit for the names.
In the early 1900s, Canadian Pacific Railway built its Kettle Valley line to connect the B.C. coast with the Kootenay region.
According to B.C. Parks, CP Rail cut through three mountain ranges, creating several stations and five tunnels along the way. The tunnels are known as the Othello tunnels.
B.C. Parks says it was CP Rail’s engineer, Andrew McColluch (1864-1945) who named the route’s stations – Lear, Portia, Iago, Romeo and Juliet – because he was an avid reader of Shakespeare.
But the Provincial Archives of B.C. says it was Kettle Valley Railway president James J. Warren (1870-1939), a Toronto corporate lawyer and director, who came up with the names.
And yet a third source, a book called 1001 British Columbia Place Names, which was first published in 1969, states this: “… a daughter of James J. Warren, president of the Kettle Valley Railroad, persuaded her father to name the stations east of Hope after Shakespearean characters. …”
So, we know the names originate from the laying of the Kettle Valley rail line. We just don’t know for sure if it was the company’s president, his daughter, or the engineer who actually got the idea to reference Shakespeare literature along the route.
In the end, we can thank all three of them for establishing the most lyrical and interesting geographical names found on any Canadian highway.
Happy once again to be out of the smoke. We are very close to home now.
It is evident that we are no longer in Alberta!!!
Home again! We had a really great 18 days or so. We found our roots, took some of my Mom home, visited with extended family and met some very very nice prairie people. The kindness and friendliness of these people make us proud to be Canadian. They are the best Canadians!!!