June 25, 2007
The trip home on saturday was pretty uneventful. We’ve now had a full week to recover and get back into the swing of things at our jobs.
I can see now why people take a honeymoon. Katy and I really are closer than we have been, and I didn’t think that was possible. Taking some time after all the stress of the wedding and how crazy our life has been for the past several months to focus just on ourselves and each other was incredibly important.
We had a wonderful time (even in Vancouver), and have many wonderful memories. We’ll post pictures at some point soon. But the memories we have together are the most precious of all.
It was a great trip.
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June 16, 2007
Awoke felling much better than I had the night before. Has a passable breakfast prepared by the innkeepers, and wait a few hours for the rain to die down. We pile in the car and head for downtown. First, we head over to the park on the west side of the island where the clerk at the first hotel had said there was parking. There is. For 2$ an hour. So we drive around for a bit more, see some of the park, and find a spot with a lot of people at an outlook. So we park, pay our 2$, look at the view over the water to ‘North Vancouver’, and, err, that’s about it. 5 minutes of looking, one plaque, and errr…well, I guess that’s our 2$.
So we get back in the car and decide to try our luck downtown. Katy’s heard the ‘Gastown’ district’s nice, so we drive there, after finding no parking where the ‘P’s were on the map, we drive around a bit more an find a garage on the edge of Gastown. Garage smells of urine, flies everywhere walking down the stairs, but it did only cost $6 to park. The street looks run down, graffiti everywhere. Walk a few blocks though, and you get into Gastown which is quite a nice little tourist spot. Walked around a little, stopped at a chain spaghetti place for lunch (very good), and then walked some more and stopped in a few shops. There we saw a postcard for the famous suspension bridge over a lush green gorge just north of town, so we decided to go, since there wasn’t much else to see in Gastown.
Back to the car, and out of the city. Find our way up to the suspension bridge. Since we’d been nickle’d and dime’d the whole time in Vancouver, we were jokingly taking guesses on how much they would charge us to walk across the bridge. Katy guessed 15$, I guessed 10$. We get there, park ($2), expecting a bridge across a ravine and a donation box, and instead find a whole little park there that they charge $27/person admission to. After picking up our jaws, we came to our senses right then and decided to cut our losses. Screw them, it doesn’t matter how pretty the gorge is, it’s not $60 pretty. Yes, there are other things to do in the park.. nature tours, actors reenacting stuff, other stuff they’ve built in there, but come on, that’s ridiculous. So we decide to waste the $2 parking fee (note how many times we’ve wasted parking money today), and drive a little further up the regoinal park and find a nice place off in the woods with (free!) parking and trails. It’s actually a salmon hatchery, which was pretty cool seeing and learning about the salmon.
We had dinner reservations downtown at a nice jazz/blues restaurant, so we still had a few hours to kill. So we drove back into town (more traffic), and then off to the west side of downtown, where we found a nice park overlooking the water. We parked ($2), found a bench, and then watched the sun on the water and read the Car Talk Puzzlers to each other while relaxing. Probably my favorite time in all of Vancouver.
Had a nice dinner that night (‘free’ parking, because a nice guy who was leaving the garage near the restaurant had paid for all night and then didn’t need it, so he gave it to us… one of the few nice things that happened to us in Vancouver..otherwise it would have been $4). Dinner was great, the music was good, and the night ended rather well.
We got back to the B&B, got a third set of conflicting instructions on what to do with the room key when we checked out, packed, repacked, and now we’re off to bed. We have to catch a 7am plane tomorrow, a 2 hour layover in Denver, and then back to home sweet home.
We ended up having an OK time in Vancouver, but it fell far short of what everyone around us had talked it up to being. People were telling us we’d want to move there after visiting, and that’s hardly the case. I know there must be a lot of good points to this city, but I guess we just missed some of them. Oh well. We still had a good time.
Now, off to sleep.
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June 16, 2007
Since we had time in the morning, we decided to catch the ‘Titanic’ exhibit at the natural history museum in Victoria before catching the ferry. We caught the early showing of the IMAX movie, and then walked through the exhibit of preserved Titanic artifacts. Quite interesting. Very crowded though. The fact that clothes and paper survived (most by being encased in treated leather, which microbes can’t break down) is just astonishing. We’re also trying to figure out how a bottle of champaign, with it’s cork still in place, wouldn’t collapse under the pressure of the outside water. If it allowed sea water in, then how would it still have champaign in it? and if it didn’t, how would the pressure equalize? Anyway, cool exhibit.
Caught the Ferry over to the mainland. No vending machine hot chocolate this time. But they had a full service Cafe on board, so that was good enough. Got off the ferry and started moving towards Vancouver, which Katy and I had both been looking forward too most our whole trip. We’d heard such wonderful things about the city. Our first experience? Traffic, at a standstill, heading into town at 3:30 on a thursday afternoon. Oh well, every city has traffic. Also, the city skyline itself fails to impress me, the buildings look dingy (almost eastern-blockish) and there’s a -lot- of sprawl.
So we eventually find our way to the hotel, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a reservation for you’. Apparently an email saying ‘Yes, please book these accommodations’ wasn’t clear enough for them to, ohh, I don’t know, actually book the room. Their entire reservation process seemed haphazard and incredibly unprofessional. The clerk also wasn’t incredibly helpful either, he refused to admit we’d been wronged, but did offer to call another place nearby that they send people to when they overbook.. ‘Not that that happens often…but when it does..’ yeaah, riiight buddy. So Katy and I aren’t happy at this point, we wanted to stay downtown, and this other place is 10min away. But after calling another downtown hotel and having them be booked up we didn’t have much choice. He called the place 10min away and they said they would hold a room for us. “We don’t know why, but they always seem to have room”, the clerk told us.
Funny that.
So we follow the directions to the new place (the clerk gave us the wrong house number, but we were able to figure it out from the online picture of the house… why did we need to do that? the place has no sign). It’s a B&B in an oldish looking medium sized house. We open the door and ask the woman who answers if we’re at the right place. Through her broken english we determine that, yes we are, but she hasn’t heard what’s going on. She calls the B&B owner, who also says on the phone with broken english, that she doesn’t seem to have any idea what’s going on. After 10 minutes of us going “WTF?!? You just talked to the clerk from the other hotel on the phone!”, we finally figured out they did have a room, available for both nights we’d be here, but it was c$10 more a night they we were quoted, at this point we just said fine.
This place is kind of a dump. I mean, the grounds are very nice, but the insides aren’t as nice. No A/C, the roof deck is rotting, the beds are squeaky and incredibly uncomfortable, the family that runs the place is nice enough but they don’t speak english well so we can’t ask them for advise on what to do. We don’t really have access to public transportation schedules, so to go downtown we’ll have to pay for parking. Needless to say, Katy and I were very annoyed by the point, but glad to have at least -a- room, somewhere semi-close to downtown Vancouver.
We looked up and found a Russian place online for dinner and decided to try it. The food was good, but I wasn’t feeling well by that point and we decided just to call it a day.
I guess our biggest thing was that every other place we visited, we were met by friendly people who were pretty eager to help us when we needed it, and we didn’t get that here. We got kicked out of our hotel, without them admitting any smidgen of responsibility, and they sent us to a place which wasn’t even run well enough to have more then a quarter roll of toilet paper in the bathroom. Hopefully we’ll get to see some more of the Vancouver everyone tells us is so great because so far it’s…far short of that.
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June 16, 2007
Another early morning car ferry and we were across the border into Canada. This time we were the last car on the ferry, and thus were parked on a precarious incline at the back of the ferry tilted about 25 degrees towards the ocean. It felt a lot steeper when we were in the car. Anyway, yet another uneventful trip, and yet more vending machine hot chocolate.
Landed in Sydney, got through customs with no hassles, and started are way down to Victoria. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, and also the largest city on Vancouver Island (Vancouver the city is on the mainland, and where we were heading next). Since it was an early morning ferry we got into Victoria a little after noon and checked into our hotel, the ‘Magnolia Spa and Hotel’. It also happens to be a spa, and beats out the Hilton in Seattle for the most expensive hotel we stayed at. Even at Canadian dollars, the over 16% taxes added onto the end became a bit much. The room was -very- nice though, and well worth the money this late in our trip.
Victoria is -very- nice. It has a smallish downtown, with an inner harbor and an seaplane runway right in the middle of it. It was quite fun watching the planes land and take off. We walked around the harbour, grabbed lunch at an english style pub, tried 2 ATMs until we found one that would work with our american banks, and took a little harbor ferry back downtown. During our travels we found a little ‘street’ of floating houses. Basically, a floating doc with a whole bunch of house boats shaped like real houses. Most were for sale, one small one for c$100,000.00. They were quite fun to look at.
Anyway, we were exhausted, so we came back for a nap in the later afternoon and then wandered around and grabbed some sushi for dinner. Ok, I don’t like sushi, so I had the white boy special, and Katy had sushi, but regardless. Then we saw them light up the state house (they light it up every night, and several buildings around the downtown also do it), and returned back to the hotel for some sleep.
Victoria was one of my favorite places on the trip. Even though it seems their entire waterfront is being overrun with condos and hotels, the people were all incredibly friendly and helpful, the city was pretty alive with people, and there seemed to be a decent amount to do. A very nice place, and I’m glad we came.
Tomorrow, our ferry to the mainland isn’t until 2pm, so we still have some time in Victoria in the morning.
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June 16, 2007
Orcas Island is part of the San Juan Island chain in the northwest part of Washington state. We took a ferry there from Anacortes and got in around around 11am. The ferry trip was cool, as car ferries generally are. There’s just something in your mind that screams ‘Don’t drive into the water’ as you pull onto a boat. But we wandered topside and enjoyed the trip. They had a hot chocolate vending machine, which is something of a weird fettish of mine. Vending machine hot chocolate became my staple at my first job, and many jobs thereafter, and the engineering lounge at RPI when I was in college. Anyway..
Orcas Island is lovely. We drove up to ‘East Sound’ and walked around for a while. Found another book shop and bought the ‘Car Talk Puzzlers’ flash cards, which we will be going through for the rest of the trip. From there we drove up to the top of Mt. Constitution, the tallest point on the island. From there you can see both Vancouver Island and the several mountains of Washington, as well as all the San Juan islands.
We then went over to West Sound where we found our hotel. Turns out we were the only people staying in the multi-room lodge (which was cheaper) instead of their cottages, so we got the whole big cottage to ourselves. They had scrabble. Much merriment (and trash talking, and word inventions, occurred. I still think ‘yale’ is a type of lock and not a proper noun. But that’s ok.) Had dinner at the inn’s restaurant, which was quite good.
Tomorrow we have to catch an early morning ferry to Sydney Harbour on Vancouver Island.
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