Vancouver-Seattle, round trip in a day

Is it possible?

Border, «a line separating two countries, administrative divisions or other areas».

Yes, it is possible to have breakfast in Vancouver (Canada), lunch in Seattle (USA) and dinner back in Vancouver.
How? I am pretty sure you can do it by plane, but you would miss that adventure kinda feeling that the bus can give 😛

Here I recommend you some things to know before jumping on that bus:

– to enter the USA you need an ESTA Travel authorization: it costs around 21 USD and you can apply online. After the payment, you’ll be notified about the status of your request. Don’t panic if you don’t get it approved immediately, it may take a while even if the payment went through.

– Apparently you also need a document called I-94: this is an arrival card requested by customs at the border and it costs 6 USD; we didn’t know about it but we could easily pay by card at the border.

– Bus options: from the 2nd of June 2022 the route Vancouver-Seattle is also covered by Flixbus, but we traveled the day before so we had to opt for Greyhound; a round trip for 2 people costed us 117 USD (cents more, cents less) – easy to purchase online by googling “bus Vancouver-Seattle” (you’ll need to print the tickets).

– You will have to fill a departure/arrival card in the bus station with the information about your trip, usually the driver has some on the bus in case you forget.

At this point you have all you need to enter the USA border 🙂

After couple of stops more and 4 hours driving, you will arrive to Seattle Stadium Station and you’ll have two options: walk to the city center or take the train to Westlake Station to be few blocks away from the Pike Place Market, one of the few attractions of the city which hides, in its Post Alley, the famous Gum Wall; yes, one of the highlights of Seattle is a wall covered in chewed bubble gums (sounds more disgusting that it actually looks) :).

If you ever watched at least one season of Grey’s Anatomy, you’ll recognize the most famous spot of Seattle, the Space Needle. You can get at the bottom of it by taking the Monorail from Westlake to Seattle City Center (round trip ticket costs 6 USD and it can be purchased at the machines using card only).

For a nice view of the Space Needle and the city, we were recommended to walk to Kerry Park, but we were short of time since the bus arrived 1 hour later so we did not take the risk and went back to the Greyhound base.

To be fair, it’s been less than a day: we literally stayed in Seattle for few hours only but there was not too much more to see – the first Starbucks of all times? It looked exactly like a modern and normal one so well, you could stay longer but if you simply wanna put your flag there, couple of hours are definitely enough.

Things you better remember before getting back on the bus to Vancouver:

– to get into Canada you need an eTA Travel Authorization (it costs 7 CAD), but you have it already if you were departing from Vancouver after breakfast, so all good because it only expires after 5 years 😉

– To enter Canada, you are requested to fill the ArriveCAN and if you left Canada after breakfast, you have to fill a new one before dinner 😛 Basically you need to update the ArriveCAN every time you are entering the country.

– You will have to fill another departure/arrival card in the bus station with the information about your trip and once again the driver should have some on the bus if you forget.

You’re now ready to cross the border again and go back to “the Maple Leaf State.. [where] the people are nice and speak French too” (Five Iron Frenzy – Oh, Canada).