Vancouver British Columbia

Day 30 British Columbia

Today is our longest straight drive. And south, the sun will actually go down before midnight. We should be in the car for about 10 hours until we reach the city of Vancouver. Where we get to stay in a nice Hilton. We also discovered we will be in Vancouver on the busiest weekend of the year, BC day weekend. I'm not sure what BC day celebrates, but it's a big deal.

5:30am

We packed up camp by six am and were on the road by seven, surprisingly the GPS says we will arrive at 3:00pm. With the time change that drops our drive time to nine hours. Not so bad.
Close to noon we decided to stop for lunch at Tim Hortons, apparently the restaurant is "very" Canadian. As it turns out it is primarily a doughnut shop, that also serves soup and sandwiches. They are also the first place we have encountered that does not accept Visa. Fortunately they do accept American currency, making a small profit off of the exchange. Oh well, it's the cost of a Canadian sandwich.

3:00 pm

The GPS was dead on, we arrived at the hotel in high spirits, checked in and headed up to our room, which was located on the 11th floor and required a keycard to make the elevator run. Pretty cool. Getting to the room we were greeted by the sight on one king size bed. Looks like one of us is sleeping on a roll out bed tonight. And it's been thirty days since my last bed , so I took it upon myself to claim the bed.
We didn't let the bed thing dampen our spirits in the least, not only was the hotel outfitted with a giant Korean mall attached to the lobby, but they had free Wi-Fi! Finally I could pull the trigger on the backed up blogs since Glacier National Park, sift through my 75 emails and log into my bank account. As it turns out Canada has their international transaction fee set as a percentage. Interesting.

6:00pm

Deciding there was just to much going on in the city to hang around at the hotel, we had a vodka tonic, and started walking towards the SkyTrain station. Vancouver has a public transportation system similar to the New York subway system. Interestingly the SkyTrain is above ground and elevated like a monorail in our section of town, but ends up beneath the downtown area. With a little help from some ladies on the train we figured out which stop to exit that would yield us the best access to goings on in the city.
Our first order of business was food, walking down the busy downtown street we just grabbed the closest restaurant, which turned out to be prohibition era speakeasy themed. Complete with flapper girls. We ordered a pitcher of beer, some potato skins, our entrees and relaxed a bit. It wasn't long before I overheard some conversation that piqued my interest behind me. Social as I am I turned to meet these folks. They ended up being a local Vancouver based band that had recently returned from a tour on the southern states. Playing from Texas up so sacramento. They are a heavy metal group called Titans Eve, although they didn't strike me as the heavy metal sort, I'll have to YouTube some of their music.

9:00pm

We continued walking in the direction of the harbor, as supposedly there is a large firework show closer to ten. Finding our way was easy, just follow the people. The thousands of people. As we walked we quickly realized that the big event of the day was the gay pride parade that must have taken place earlier in the day. People still in costume and the like. We paid them no mind, and made our way down to the harbor. The difference with Canadians and Americans. In America people would be stacked on top of each other filling in every available gap, trying to get a good seat for the fireworks. Here people are courteous of personal space. Fortunately we aren't Canadian, and quickly found a spot right in the front.
The fireworks were as expected, big, bright, and full of audience participation. Perhaps living so close to Disneyland I've become Jaded to fireworks. Don't get me wrong they were great, I even saw a few that were new to me. Watching the police boats herding kayaks that kept creeping into the evacuation route was almost more entertaining.
As soon as the show was over we started the adventure that was returning to the hotel. Our first goal was to get to a side street to avoid the crowds, that was no small task in itself. Once safely away from the crowds we picked our way through residential streets towards the SkyTrain. Had we not still been slightly abuzz from the beer, we may have found our train with ease. That was not the case. The trip that only took us thirty minutes to the harbor, lasted over an hour getting back. We wound our way through alleys, in circles, down into totally different, and wrong train stations and finally to the train back to the Hilton in Metrotown. The train was packed. Crowded with all manner of folk. At one stop an angry young guy with a mohawk and bloody hands came cursing into our car, he was exactly what you would expect to see on a subway.

1:00am

We made it! A real bed at last. The embrace of the cool sheets was ten fold better after this long day, and night of adventure. Sleep came quickly.

MILEAGE:

Driving-

This trip: 506
Total: 4279

Walking-

This trip: 6
Total:189