vancouver day one

Erik's coworker Gerry was originally to be our guide, but he bagged out the night before. We never really got out of the lax mindspace to organize anything, so it's no surprise that we started out late: almost 11am.

Traffic wasn't bad until about halfway to Seattle, in the middle of nowhere. Erik phoned around to see if anyone could find out if an accident was causing the slowdown. Just when he got his mom on the phone, traffic loosened up and we took off.

I took the wheel around Olympia. Getting over the border was quick and easy. I actually felt some panic nearing the line, as though it would be a difficult thing to drive over, or I wouldn't understand road signs on the other side, or some untold foreign difficulty would thwart me.

I don't drive much when I travel. Erik has much more experience with winter driving, and gets carsick reading in the car. I, on the other hand, am easily distracted by cool places to stop, not very aggressive, and can navigate the hell out of a map. It's a good partnership.

Anyhow, it's an odd event to drive into another country, for the insular US of A.

I half expected everything to be different on the other side, half expected nothing to be. It was a bit darker. Street and traffic signs were smaller and looked older. Different font, perhaps. Reading metric measurements was a bit odd.

Then we hit insane traffic, still a ways outside Vancouver. Stopped. For an hour. It took 1 1/2 hours to slog through five lanes merging into one through a short tunnel, for no apparent reason. The drive through the city, downtown and our hotel wasn't bad at all.

We parked in a huge garage, called a "parkade" in Canadian, and checked into the Lamplighter. After choosing a room and resting a bit, we decided to trek out to a vegan-friendly pizza place. It was a bit far away, and we had no maps (since Gerry was going to be our guide), so the sweet, fumbley guy at the front desk called Rebellious Tomato Organic Gourmet Pizza for us to get directions. I ended up teaching him how to use Google Maps.

Erik drove, we both ate tasty curry-sauced pizza, then went back to our hotel to hit the hay. But as Erik turned the key to open the door to our room, I realized that the music-- coming from the nightclub attached to the hotel, two floors below-- was actually good. We sat in the room for a moment before deciding to go down to the bar. We had a couple of beers, watched the rest of In Flight Safety's set, and sat through a bit of the next band. The best part was people watching. Such an odd place, in the most mundane details. We went upstairs to bed around 1am, and I slept great on the saggy bed with the ear plugs that came with the room.