Vancouver: Day 5 – 6

Day 5 – Saturday

Since it rained in the morning, Manna [potion] and I decided to visit Granville Island first on our agenda! It's this cute little shopping area, with a large food market, artist studios, specialty shops, and even a small art college.






Lots of pigeons in the food area, looking for scraps... reminded me of downtown Minneapolis. :P


Another letterpress!!! This guys studio was PRISTINE! Too bad it wasn't open so we couldn't go in and play... :(

After this, we biked around Stanley Park along the Seawall path. Very pretty, but kinda overcast from the rain that afternoon.















That evening, we ate at the bay-side restaurant outside my hotel, which was pretty good. I was very tempted to get the lobster, but opted for the fish stir-fry instead. After that, I went back to the hotel room and packed, then watched the new Star Trek movie in HD! Good picture on their flat-screen TV in the room... sound was crap, though. :)

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Day 6 – loooooong Sunday (of hell!)

Got up early to check out and walk to Manna's. She walked me to the train station, which takes you directly to the airport for only $2.50!

So here's where the exhaustion starts... I stood in SIX separate lines before finally getting onto the plane!

1- ticket line (length = 30 minutes)
2- extra line to get into the customs area (length = 10 minutes)
3- main customs/claims line (length = 15 minutes)
4- smaller customs/claims line in front of the authorities' desks (length = 15 minutes)
5- submitting luggage line (length = 5 minutes) [in Mpls, they do it right at the ticket line, which I love!]
6- security line (length = 30 minutes)

Finally made it into the terminal, but accidentally took a wrong turn, thanks to the poor informational signage, which cost me another 10 minutes...

7- plane gate line (phew!)

It took a good 2 hours to get to my Gate... good thing I allowed time for that! Plus, there's a whole lot of construction going on inside their airport, due to the Olympics this winter... I certainly hope they fix it up before then, for efficiencies sake!!! It really made me appreciate our Mpls airport here... it's very clean and updated, and can be pretty quick to check into, all things considered.

Anyway, first flight was on a small plane down to Portland. This flight was fine, except for one extra bit of turbulence where the plan dropped a good 10 feet! People gasped and spilled their drinks due to the gravity shift... made my stomach drop, too. :P

After we landed, I power-walked to my new gate and boarded the larger NWA plane. This one was pretty full... no extra seats for me to stretch out on. :(

I sat next to this kid (well, he was a freshman in college, I think), who was in the middle seat. I was next to the window, but no one ended up sitting in the aisle seat next to him... so, I figured he would move over, but he didn't!!! Ugh, he sat in the middle seat the whole time... wtf...

Finally we land 3 hours later, and it felt SO good to be home! :)

So I walk down to the baggage claim area and text Mum to tell her I'm almost ready to be picked up. I stand at the third carousel and monitor the surprisingly sparse number of bags coming around... 5 minutes later, it stops... no bag!!! Ahhhh!!! This is NOT something I'm in the mood to deal with at the moment, and I've never had this issue before in all my life. So I go to the Oversized Baggage window nearby and tell the woman that my bag is missing. She clicks her computer for a moment, then tells me my bag is still in PORTLAND! WTF!!! I ask her why, and she says basically someone didn't recognize that it needed to be on today's flight, and that it would arrive on tomorrows, and that someone would deliver it to my home when it came in. BIG SIGH... I purposely came back on Sunday so I would have Monday off of work and be able to do laundry and unpack and mentally cleanse before getting back into work. Never fails to get effed up. >:|

So mum is driving me home when I go over all the things I don't have in my possession... that's when I realize I packed my cell phone charger in my luggage. And of course, I had not charged it the night before, because I had full bars then, and I didn't think I'd be charger-less today... so now my phone is turned off cause I had one bar left last night, and I have to save juice for tonight when the baggage people show up and call me. Oh, and my extra charger is at work, because my cell battery acts up sometimes and dies while I'm at work. Never thought I'd need an extra one for my house eventually!

And the last bit of icing on the cake, is when I checked my mailbox before going up to my condo... I had requested online, that they hold my mail until Tuesday. Well, I had a feeling... so I checked the box and sure enough, there's PILES of a week's worth of junk mail and two bills stuffed in the tiny little box. DOUBLE ARG! Actually, no ARG... too exhausted to be mad anymore. :P

So today, I'm luggage-less, which has been hanging over my head all morning (not last night though, cause I took a Sleep Aid to knock me out). Luckily, I packed small portions of my toiletries, but most of my (favorite/usual) clothes are still in Portland. I can do without for now... but the one saving-grace is that I always store those shitty toothbrushes the dentist gives you for free — so I could brush my teeth at least! And normally I have 1 toothpaste here, except I was running out, so I had just bought a new one and took the nearly-empty one on vacation with me...

Okay, so negativity aside, today I'm relaxing and going to probably finish up Dexter S3 (which is SO good!) and most likely play WoW. :D Since I have no food here besides cereal and milk, I cross my fingers that at least one Chinese place is open in the neighborhood, so I can eat some REAL food (unlike yesterday).

I'll post one more blog about the trip, which will include the results of tonight's luggage fiasco, and a link to all the pictures I took, which I plan to post now, on Flickr!