Our trip to Vancouver, BC came and went with the only really hitch coming at the US-Canada border. It was s-l-o-o-o-o-w both coming and going. I miss the good old days when you could just flash a driver's license and rock across the border. I'm talking about pre-9/11, which is literally the last time I visited our northern neighbor. Now, it's not too involved a process -- it only takes a few minutes once you get to a border agent -- but that added time accumulates and turns what used to be a wait-time of maybe five minutes into one ten times that.
It also doesn't help when you get stopped on the way back into the US because your car set off some sort of radiation sensor. That's what happened to us. It was never fully explained to me exactly what happened, but they said I was parked between two sensors for too long, which ultimately set them off. I was like, Bitch, if I was parked anywhere for too long it's because of your slow asses! Well, that's what I was saying in my head. Outwardly, I was being polite and compliant, just wanting to get on with my life as quickly as possible. And I did. The whole thing took under ten minutes (they had to wave our car down with a wand), and I got to go pee, which I had to do anyway, so it worked out fine.
The trip itself was super fun, if brief. Vancouver is a great city -- so beautiful and such a cool vibe. The hotel we stayed at was not so great, but it worked. S and Y -- we went with our friends JW and Y and their three boys (ages 5, 3, and 3) -- booked it after they tried a bunch of other places first. It was all we could get on relatively short notice. It could best be described -- to use a word from my youth that is surely problematic now -- as ghetto. It was old and understaffed and not very clean.
The first morning we were there, about 6:00 am, S heard somebody screaming in the room next to us -- things like "get away from me!" and "stop it!" -- so, she, very bravely, knocked on the door, while I watched from the hallway ready to call the police if need be. In retrospect, it probably made more sense to reverse those roles, but I honestly wasn't even fully awake and wasn't thinking straight. In fact, it later dawned on me I didn't even know how to call the police in Canada.*
*But actually I did. I looked it up, and it's just 9-1-1, like here. Plus, I bet if I pressed the Emergency button on my iPhone it would put me through to somebody.
Thankfully, it didn't come that. A woman came to the door and explained her special needs child was having an episode, and she (the mother) was having trouble calming her down. That's not a good thing, of course, but short of people rehearsing a play or having a (consensual) BDSM session, it's about as reasonable an explanation as you can hope for in that situation. Also, S saw the woman and her daughter later that day, and they seemed normal and unharmed and even suggested a place where we rent bicycles, which we did the following day. We rode around the Seawall which is a beautiful loop.
But not as beautiful as the views from Grouse Mountain, which is where we spent most our time. We did a ropes course,* looked at grizzly bears, watched a lumberjack competition, and then hiked back down the mountain. We took a gondola up, but the line to get back down was super long, so we decided to foot it, even though it's nearly three miles down rocky, rooty terrain, and we had two toddlers in the mix.
*Just JW, Lil' S1, and me. The other kids were too young, so they went to a play area with the womenfolk.
We made it, but it was quite taxing. I had a toddler in my arms for about 75% of it. It wasn't the weight; it was the awkwardness of how it's distributed. Plus, I was nervous about falling, so a few times I kinda accidentally-on-purpose slid to my butt, lest I take a worse tumble. JW had his technique down where he could hold a child on his shoulders and navigate the terrain with just his legs, but I needed a free hand for balance, so I did a curled-bicep-to-the-shoulder carry. I gotta admit, it did make me feel pretty manly, and if you want to woo women, carrying tired children long distances is a great way to go. I could tell S was impressed. Also, little dude straight up zonked out on my shoulder, which was adorable.
The only thing I feel like we missed out on is that we didn't get to sample the Vancouver nightlife. We didn't even go out for dinner (S packed a bunch of food in a cooler). C'est la vie when you have young children and a wife who goes to sleep at 9:00 every night. But we hit up Bellingham for lunch on the way back, which was awesome. I love that city. I need to go there more often. I could live there again happily, I think -- at least during the summer. It's pretty wet and gray there the other seasons. We ate lunch at a beer garden, where craft brew is served on-tap by a heavily tatted burly chick in boots and a tank top, all the food is cooked at an on-site food truck, and you can hear The Strokes and The Shins coming through the speakers. I turned to S and said, "Well, if nothing else, you're getting a quintessential Bellingham experience." I could tell she didn't appreciate it the way I did, but that's okay.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment