Not To Be Trusted With Knives

The King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams

October 8, 2013 by Beth

A long, long time ago (i.e., 2009), the King George Highway in Surrey was renamed “King George Boulevard”. And since that time, Kalev and I have been referring to it as the King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams. And every time we did, it made me giggle. Which led Kalev to suggest “we are going to have to drive the King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams end-to-end… just for the happy!” Which led to me add “drive the entire length of the King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams with Kalev” as item #98 on my list of 101 things to do. Which is how last night, Kalev and I came to find ourselves driving the entire length of the KGBoDB!

For the uninitiated, the KGBoBD runs from the Patullo Bridge coming out of New Westminster, all the way down 8th Avenue, which is 8 blocks away from the United States of America.

Kalev and I set out along this route, stopping for dinner at Taste of Punjab because omg, so delicious. And then we were off down the Boulevard. And since we were only 8 blocks away from Zero Avenue, which runs along the Canada-US border, we decided to drive there too. And it’s kind of crazy, because it basically runs along one edge of a subdivision and on the side of the road is a small fence and then on the other side of the fence is America. And there’s a subdivision on the other side of the fence, but those houses are in a totally different country. And it’s just a fence separating them. So all these people have neighbours just across the street that they couldn’t just, like, walk across the street and ask to borrow a cup of sugar, because you aren’t allowed on the other side of the fence without a passport and without going all the way to one of the border crossings so that a border guard could check said passport and that seems like a lot of work to get a cup of sugar. It’s just.. weird.

Also weird is that Kalev and I have had a running joke about the King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams for 4 years and  we were talking about completely different things. This came to light because I’d created a little playlist to accompany us on our trip. I filled the playlist up with songs that made me think of Surrey:

And then I put it on shuffle and let my iPhone choose which tunes to play. We listened all the way down the KGBoBD, and on our little detour to drive down Zero Ave, and then all the way back up the KGBoBD and as we approached the Patullo Bridge. as I noticed that Jesus of Suburbia was playing,  I said, “I can’t believe Boulevard of Broken Dreams never came on!”, because I’d put it was on the playlist, obviously, but I guess I had more songs than we needed for the journey. And Kalev had no idea what I was talking about. And I was all “The Green Day song? The reason we’ve been calling it the King George Boulevard of Broken Dreams?!” And he was all, “I was talking about the painting called Boulevard of Broken Dreams . The one with Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Elvis in the diner?!” And I was like, “wha??”

So, yeah, apparently we’ve been laughing over completely different jokes for 4 years. Happily, I now know about the painting and he now knows about the Green Day song, so in addition to knocking item #98 off my 101 list, it was also *educational*. Win-win!

Now let’s all celebrate with some Green Day!

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