road trip, day 7

countdown to the Winter Olympics, originally uploaded by Kaijsa.

We went to Canada on our seventh day, which was a Friday. It was an easy, quick drive up to Vancouver. We stopped on the way in Skagit County for a coffee, and I was surprised and happy to see Scott, best friend of my brother and sister-in-law at Starbucks. I knew he managed a store up there, but had forgotten and didn't know which one. It was nice to see him.

As we got back on the road, I realized that I'd accidentally pulled the hood release when I got out of the car at Starbucks. I knew my shoelace had caught on something, but didn't really think about it. Oops. Luckily, the hood just bounced a little as I got on the freeway, and we were able to pull off and fix it before it could fly open. Sometimes I astound myself with my brilliance. Let's just say this wasn't the only driving/car related snafu on the trip that can be credited to me.

We got across the border into Canada pretty quickly, for a weekend morning, and made it to Vancouver and parked off Robson with no real hassle. Then, we basically spent the day walking all over town.

Robson wasn't that interesting to Rick, with all it's shopping and stuff. Both of us were hungry, so we pretty much immediately went into Tsunami for sushi! I dug in immediately, grabbing my first plate from the boats before my ass was completely in my seat. Rick noticed that as people were seated at the bar, they all did the same thing as I had. I'd never really thought about it because who wouldn't grab sushi as fast as the could? And we did put away our most expensive meal of the trip in about 15 minutes, so I guess I'm right.

Then we decided to go into a couple of stores, like Roots, the custom t-shirt store, and the salmon place. Retail fatigue set in pretty quickly, though. Rick was interested in going to Gastown, and I'd never made it there before (Robson and Granville streets always suck me in for my entire visits). So we hoofed it up to the waterfront, looked at some big ships, and then found Gastown. It's smaller than I had expected, and not as nice (in my opinion) as Pioneer Square in Seattle. But we did have the pleasure of seeing a flotilla of junkies on a very stinky street.

After Gastown, we thought about walking to English Bay, but then decided to get the car and drive to Stanley Park, another place I'd always meant to see. After some navigational issues stemming from incorrectly guessing which streets terminate in a turn-only lane, we made it into the park. We basically just drove almost all the way around it, pausing for Rick to take a few pictures here and there, and finally parked at Beach Number Two. That's a pretty creative name, there.

I think I was getting tired at this point, and we ended up just walking up to English Bay and getting gelato and sitting near the beach for a little while. It was a beautiful day, and there were lots of people hanging out, but I was pretty much mentally done. I think I cut Rick's Vancouver experience a little short, which kind of sucks.

After collecting the car, we drove through nasty weekend traffic to the border, where we sat for over an hour waiting to get through the US side. Why is it so much easier to get into Canada than the US? I sort of forced Rick to take the wheel while we waited to cross, and he ended up driving all the way to Marysville.

After I took the wheel again, I drove him across the flats and stopped at Langus Park, so he could see the boathouse and the river where I rowed in high school. It was just dark, and it reminded me of being there after hours for high school shenanigans.

By then, we were pretty hungry and we wanted Burgermaster. I thought I'd be wise and hit the one in Silver Lake/Mill Creek because I thought it would be closer to my parents' place. I had forgotten how far east that place really is! It took forever to wind through the suburbs to get there. I should have just gone to the one in North Seattle and then turned around. But we made it with a half hour to spare before closing, and I had the tastiest cheeseburger I'd had in a long time and a root beer shake. So good.

When we finally got home, my mom had a replay of Olympics opening ceremony on, which we'd missed. So we watched that for a while before hitting the sack. I crashed so hard that night.