Around The World – Vancouver
My next goal is to get to Vancouver where I can sponge off the relatives, eat Cool Ranch Doritos and sleep all day for a couple of weeks.
Woke up in the morning in Auckland with a sore throat, got some good pills and lozenges from a very helpful pharmacist at the airport.
A fast overnight in Sydney, followed by uneventuful but long flights to Tokyo and Vancouver. Another 787, played with the LCD window shade until I got bored.
Touched down back in my homeland. Walked right up to the immigration desk, no 2 hour line at all like last time. Grilled more entering Canada than I have at any border checkpoint. After watching multiple airport customs TV shows, I had checked all of the Yes boxes on the quarrantine form but the agent looked at my shoes and let me right through.
I walked out to the passenger pick up area but couldn’t see anybody I recognized. Called Terry using the phone at the Info desk and she thought I was coming in tomorrow! While I waited, I went to the 7-11 in the airport but they were out of tourist SIM cards. Ugh. I walked out to the parking garage but Terry somehow got past me so I found her and walked back to the parking but she forgot where she parked so we walked through the whole garage until we found her car.
Easy drive back home, big hugs from Aidan. Noodly goodness for dinner. Talked about my trip, caught up on their lives. Connor just got his learner’s permit, watch out drivers of Canada!
Woke up the next morning and set a pattern to be followed: Eat Shreddies with milk and brown sugar, watch TV.
Woke up the next morning with my right eye glued shut. Damn. And the sore throat is still mostly there. Probably related, some idiopathic head infection. Went shopping with Terry and Connor. I got some pinkeye drops and Connor got new soccer cleats. Would you pay $140 for a soccer ball? Not me!
Searching for a tourist SIM card, I went to Wind, nope, then Telus, nope. They told me Rogers would be compatible with my phone’s cellular radio. It turned out to be compatible but wow, terrible prices. A SIM card cost $10, as opposed to free or $1 everywhere else in the world. The smallest data plan is $20.75 for only 100MB of data, worst I’ve ever seen. That would be $30.75 total but they can only charge in increments of $10 so I had to pay $40 plus tax for a total of $44.80. The extra value goes towards 25c/minute incoming and outgoing voice calls. Just the worst tourist cellular plan I’ve encountered in the whole trip. We have great Wifi at the house so I will only use the cellular data when out, like for Google Maps if I’m driving somewhere. Please, somebody please complain about the oligpoly of the cellular companies in Canada. You are being ripped off!
A huge windstorm blew through in the afternoon, a tree came down in the backyard and fence sections blew out. Trees and branches are down all over the Vancouver area, and later we heard all the way down into Washington state. Power went off at 12:30 PM.
Drove to the airport with Terry and Connor to pick up Terry’s Cousin Cathy from near London, Ontario. The destruction we saw on the trip in and out was widespread.
Sister-in-law Debbie and Brian came over. Since there is no power, we ordered pizza from a place far away that still had power. We played card games and chess to candle light.
I was reading in bed when the power came on 12 hours later. Portions of the area didn’t get power back for 4-5 days. Loss of power is one thing, but the poor communication from the utility really drew the ire of the citizenry.
Woke up, the eye is looking much better. Shreddies for breakfast. Went to Costco with Mac to buy groceries, but they didn’t have any sockeye salmon so we tried Superstore. I bought a belt as my new woven leather one from Thailand’s Tesco-Lotus was shredding apart, no surprise there I guess. No salmon there either. Came home, had a dinner of corn on the cob and other good stuff. Was mocked for using two forks to eat my corn, don’t like to get butter all over my fingers.
Next morning I drove Mac to work through the tree-littered streets so we would have access to his car. Still 40K people without power, reports saying total was over 500,000 people.
Went downtown with Cathy. First stop was the Tesla store of course! Parked in the garage for a shopping mall a couple of blocks away. To stay there, you have to guess how long you’re going to stay and then pay in advance, with no refund for extra time. Pre-pay for parking is just a bad idea, then add a terrible user interface on the payment machine for the full screw-you effect.
We couldn’t walk to the Tesla store directly as some streets were blocked off due to a gas leak under the city streets. The store is quite small, only enough room for one car and no rolling chassis. After a long discussion with Tesla staff member Preston, he offered to let me have a test drive. He asked me if I wanted the P85D and I said of course! Walked to their parking area, they have 4 cars ready for test drives. We crept through the grid-locked CBD due to the light rain and gas-leak blocked roads, having to wait a couple of cycles for each light. Not the best demonstration of the Tesla’s performance. Finally the traffic opened up and we went into a not-much-used tunnel leading to the docks which luckily was also dry so I punched it in Insane mode. I could only hold the pedal down for a couple of seconds before I had to let up. My eyes went a bit tunnel-vision and I got a pulse shock of adrenaline through my system. It’s truly an unbelieveable feeling, even more than the other Teslas I’ve driven.
Cathy and I had trouble walking back to the parking garage due to the rain, gas leak and general lack of any kind of signs telling us how to find the parking garage, just awful. Finally found it and drove to Granville Island about 10 minutes away. Due to snarled traffic and several-second delays with Google Maps directions, ended up going around a bit before we got to the island market area.
Parked at another pay-before-stay place, walked past a broom shop and candle shop and went into the first seafood restaurant we spotted, just happy to get out of the rain. We went up to the top floor to a covered and heated area overlooking the narrow river between the island and the south shore of CBD. My Caesar salad with salmon was really good, Cathy said her fish sandwich was good too.
We called Terry to tell her we could pick up Mac at 3:00 and headed home. Ultra terrible traffic due to rain, dead signal lights and tree remnants – we were going to be half an hour late so called Mac. He said he would get a lift home from a co-worker and we should just go straight home. We ended up an hour late due to traffic.
I fell asleep on the couch, really tired from the early morning. Had spaghetti for dinner. Bless her heart, Terry made me a non-meat, non-onion sauce, really good. Had a White Russian and some chocolate raisins, watched TV including the Bangkok Airport show and Australia customs show.
Slept in the next morning, eye is looking much better, continuing with the drops 4 times/day.
Terry offered to drop Cathy and I off at a mall near her doctor’s office. We went down and walked around. Got a new supply of Tylenol Migraine tablets, lottery tickets, and a DQ Blizzard. We both fell asleep in some confy chairs. Saw a 2 week-old baby, so tiny!
We went over to Aunter Debbie’s for dinner – seafood soup and I passed on the clams and mussels but otherwise great. Had to get Aidan back home so short and sweet visit.
Dropped Mac off at work at 6:45 again, we’re taking his car down to the aquarium today.
Came back to the house and took Cathy in the car at 9:30. We followed Jane in the van with Aidan and she stopped and picked up Aidan’s friend Mia. We had a long, long drive to the aquarium with Jane doing lots of u-turns. We lost her in the city so pulled out Cathy’s iPhone and used maps to get us there.
The aquarium was pretty good, we saw 4 sea otters, which were playful and cute and bigger than I thought, and two beluga whales along with all of the fish and other stuff. They did try to highlight the sea life up and down the local coastline.
The next morning, Terry took Cathy and I up to Whistler. The drive took about 2.5 hours. Cold and drizzly on the way up, stayed that way once we got there. Walked through the Olympic areas, through the shops up to the Whistler and Blackcomb chairlifts. This being summer, the mountain is set up for mountain bikers. Bike racks are mounted on the chairlift to get people and their bikes up to the top. Bike riders covered in mud everywhere you look.
I drove back home, traffic was at a near-standstill in sections. Traffic really sucks here. Makes me waiting for a green light at one of my two stoplights at home seems less of a problem somehow.
Home for dinner, tortellini and pesto, caesar salad and pastries.
In the morning, my eyes are much better but believe it or not, my eyelids are getting chapped from the alcohol in the drops. I started to use Terry’s moisturizer and that’s working well. The family went to a Thai restaurant for Jane’s last day being Aidan’s carer. Quite good pad thai.
Got an email from my Father asking for my detailed itinerary so I checked on-line only to find that American Airlines has changed my next 3 flights without any notice! I emailed my around-the-world lady at AA with the details of my new flight requests and asked her to fix.
The weekend was filled with Connor’s soccer tournament, 4 games over 2 days. Started out strong but faded due to no practice over the summer. Might have won the tournament on points, not sure. The team looked great, grown boys with serious skills!
On my last day in the country, I woke up at 4:45 AM, ready to go at 5:15, and Mac drove me to the airport.
The AA check-in ladies tried to help me by putting me on a flight through Phoenix that arrives about 3 hours earlier at LAX than I was originally scheduled. It took them half an hour to change everything, and then I found I lost my first class upgrades and it took longer to go through immigration because the computer thought I was booked on two flights. Also both flight legs I was in a non-recline exit row seat. Ugh. Thanks for all of the help. I the future, I’ll just say No and stick to my plans.
I arrived in Los Angeles and was picked up by my real-estate-agent-extraordinaire, Thailand-visiting friend Sean. We drove back to his house in Grover Beach, a super easy drive with very little traffic.
We stopped at an AT&T shop to try to get my phone set up. It looked like it might work but then their computer system went down. I tried at Verizon and T-Mobile but the phone is not compatible with their network.
Fell asleep after a long day, just blocks from the eastern side of the Pacific Ocean.
