The Adam Project | Ladner Trunk Road, Delta — the motel on the edge of the farm flats

Every time-travel film needs a motel, a room with two beds and a door that opens straight onto a parking lot. The Adam Project found its Pine Ridge Motel on Ladner Trunk Road in Delta, at the Sundance Pub and Inn — a low roadside building thirty kilometres south of downtown Vancouver, where the suburbs give up and the delta farmland starts.

The setting does half the work. Ladner Trunk Road runs east across some of the flattest, richest ground in Canada: reclaimed Fraser River silt, diked in the 1890s, now potato fields, cranberry bogs and greenhouses running to the horizon. In October the pumpkin fields turn the whole plain orange. In November the snow geese arrive from Wrangel Island in the tens of thousands and settle onto the stubble in white sheets you can hear from the road.

Ladner itself, a few minutes west, is worth the detour more than the motel is. It began as a salmon-canning village on the river — the Ladner brothers arrived in 1868 — and the old core still has clapboard storefronts, a working fishing harbour, and boats tied up where the canneries used to stand. The George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary is twenty minutes further out on Westham Island.

The pub is a pub. Go for the drive out, the flat sky, and the particular loneliness of a two-storey inn sitting in the middle of farmland — which is precisely what the camera was after.

6574 Ladner Trunk Road, Delta, British Columbia.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons — farmland at Ladner.