USA Trip Thoughts — August 2026

Last month we completed a trip to the States (Idaho, specifically). One of things trips do is throw the day-to-day routine up for examination, as you build one for the trip. So it makes me notice things that are otherwise just “normal”. Here’s some of the things I noticed this trip:

• US Border wait times got extreme: normally we cross at Coutts/Sweatgrass, and in planning our trip, it’s always a bit of question mark of how much time to expect to spend here, but it’s often less than 10 minutes, and half hour on the outside. Previously, the longest I remeber being stuck at the border was one time I was driving northbound in late March and got stuck in a line of Snowbirds returning north in the motorhomes.

  This time, we were stuck for 2 hours! If there would have been a way to get out of line, I was seriously considering 80 km (and back) to Del Bonita to cross there.

  When we did finally got to the front of the line, I asked if the delay was expectional and was told “no”, that it had been this way for the last three months, as they merge the trucks and cars into a single lane every afternoon at 3:45 pm (we were crossing ~9 pm).

  I guess for the future we need to cross in by the mid-afternoon or plan on driving through Carway (south of Cardston) or Del Bonita instead (but confirm their hours, as I don’t think either are open 24/7 like Coutts).

• Montana has a ton of licence plate designs, which makes it hard to tell at a glance which plates are “Montana plates”.

• We play the “license plate game” driving, which involves trying to find a license plate from each province and state as we travel. I was surprised at the number of Maine plates we say (always on the back of a semi-truck trailer), given it’s distance from where we were and realitively small population. On the flip side, I was surprised to not see Quebec, given it’s population.
• Rural Idaho has way more houses that local argiculture should support. Maybe it’s become the playground of hobby farmers, or maybe people are opting to live in the countryside and then just commuting to jobs in large centers (I actually have a Aunt that lives like this and then drives the hour to work in the hour to the far northern suburbs of Salt Lake City for work).

• Hotels seems way more expensive than they have the right to be. The Great American Roadtrip is a vacation, but part of the appeal was (historically?) that it was relatively affordable. I recorded prices during my 2009 trip to Quebec (much of which was driving across the States), and so can compare costs:

  • meals (per person): average of $9.91 in 2009¹ vs $18.82 in 2026², so an increase of ~2x.
  • gas: average of $26.25 in 2009³ vs $72.27 today⁴, so an increase of ~3x. As it happens, I am driving the same generation of the same model of minivan on both trips, so tank size and fuel effiecincy should be very comparable.
  • hotels: $38 to $47 in 2009⁵ vs $140 to $150 in 2006⁶, so an increase of ~3x. Furthermore, the hotels in 2009 typically included breakfast for the price while neither of the 2026 hotels did. In 2026, to find a hotel including breakfast roughly doubled the price.

  This also hides the exchange rate, which adds another ~10%⁷ to these price bumps. So the trip comes in ~3x as expense as it was in 2009, in Canadian dollars. Compare to the official inflation numbers, which are 1/6 as much⁸.

  The alternative is flying five of us down and renting a car at our destination, so I suspect we’ll keep driving for now, but the price bump is crazy to see laid out.

• also on inflation, I don’t think the Canadian personal exemption (i.e. what you’re allowed to bring back across the border without paying import duties) has changed in the same time. It was CAD $800 in 2010, and is still there today….

• Banff is absolutely gorgeious. It’s been a while since I’ve been, and it’s easy to start assuming that the hype is marketing, but the mountain views really do live up to the hype. I just wish it wasn’t quite as busy so we could see more of it.