Point Roberts

To drive to Point Roberts, Washington, from anywhere else in the United States, you have to cross the Canadian border twice. The town sits on the tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula, a thumb of land hanging below British Columbia that dips just south of the 49th parallel. When the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the border along that line, no one carved out the five-square-mile tip, so it stayed American, cut off from the rest of the country by Boundary Bay.

About 1,200 people live there year-round, a number that swells in summer when Canadians fill vacation cabins. Daily life runs on cross-border arrangements. The town buys its water from Greater Vancouver under a 1987 agreement, and its one-room primary school stops at third grade, so older children ride about 40 minutes through British Columbia to classes in Blaine, crossing the border four times a day. When the border closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Point Roberts became an island in all but name.

• Washington
  The Evergreen State, the wet and dry sides of the Cascades located in
• Peace Arch
  A monument straddling the U.S.-Canada border near
• Puget Sound
  The deep glacial inlet of western Washington near
• Alburgh, Vermont
  A Vermont town joined by land only to Canada related
• Hyder, Alaska
  An Alaska town that lives on Canadian time related
• The Northwest Angle
  The only part of the lower 48 north of the 49th parallel related