Thank you very much to everyone who has written saying that they enjoy the updates. Unfortunately, we really are only in cell phone range very little (many of you would be surprised at how novel cell phones are in a LOT of the country (and continent)), and we connect to the internet by plugging the laptop into the cell phone, so we are only able to email for brief periods. If I have overlooked an email that you sent saying you enjoy the updates, my apologies. I am trying to keep in touch as well as I can without having to tear myself away from the sights, sounds and smells of the road to email for 2 hours a day. Of course, if you offer to put us up for a couple of days when we pass through your town, that may improve my communication skills...
We got up and attended mass at St. Vincent de Paul’s in Seattle and hit the road. Our first stop was at The Seattle Center, which is a large amusement/education/recreation spot a short way from downtown Seattle. They were currently hosting the 2003 International Jugglers Festival, but I’m sure you all knew that already. I was going to participate, but they wouldn’t let me bring my flaming chainsaws soaked in Cobra venom into the exhibition hall, so I couldn’t. The main attraction at the center is The Space Needle, which was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and continues to be a big hit. We went up in it, and it was fun to look out over the city. I do have to say, however, that coming from a city as hilly as San Francisco, it wasn’t as much of a thrill as I thought it would be. The view of San Francisco from the top of Twin Peaks in the center of the city is, to your humble narrator, more impressive. One thing that most certainly did impress me was the weather. The Bay Area has some changeable weather, and so does Franconia Notch, near my brother and sister in New Hampshire, but I have to say Seattle has them both licked. It went from not a cloud in the sky to black and pouring to not a cloud in the sky in about an hour. Then it kept going back and forth between these two extremes for the rest of the day. It was amazing. My theory is that all of the people in Seattle have been stolen and replaced by androids, because it would get hot and sunny, then cold and rainy, and they would just keep right on walking as if nothing had happened, half of them in rain slickers and half in t-shirts. They were completely oblivious to the weather. Maybe they were dreaming of electric sheep. After the Seattle Center, we drove north on Aurora Ave. (Rte 99) and went to see The Fremont Troll 
, which is a statue under the Aurora Bridge, not the Fremont Bridge. (?) The troll was put up in
1990 and is crushing an actual VW Beetle in its right hand. We then headed up Rte 522 and set up camp for the night near Lake Pleasant, which sounds like the setting of a slasher film if I ever heard one.
Lake Pleasant wasn’t as dangerous as it originally sounded, though there were some ducks whose quacking (in complete and utter violation of the quiet after 10pm rule) kept making Beth giggle and therefore kept me up for a while. After we woke up, Beth wanted to visit The Country Village in Bothell, which is just a few miles northeast of Seattle. Now, I enjoy arts and crafts and fairs and such, but every shop in this old-fashioned marketplace set up was selling, and I’m completely serious about this, lace doilies. So Beth spent some time wandering around and I sat in the van and ate some Apricot Flavored Creamed Honey from the Pike Place Market (on graham crackers). (The honey was on the crackers, not the market). And it was goo-hood. (The honey. I mean, the market was too, but I’m still talking about the honey). Afterwards, we made our way up Rte 5 to Larrabee State Park, which is located about 15 miles south of Bellingham. It is right on The Samish Bay, which is one of the many bays and straits that make up the large body of water where The Pacific Ocean carves into Washington State and British Columbia, the most famous being Puget Sound, which is closer to Seattle. Larrabee became Washington’s first state park in 1915. We went into Fairhaven first, just a few miles north of the park up Rte 11 (at least, legend tells of a Rte 11, though locals claim it is only a rumor) and had a great dinner at Dirty Dan Harris’ Seafood. The plates, forks, water and butter were all relatively clean, so we still don’t know what it is about Mr. Harris that makes him dirty. We then got back to the park and I set up a campfire underneath some really tall evergreens, which offered shelter from the rain. NOTE TO KIDS: Do not make fires underneath trees UNLESS you are a trained woodsman like myself, OR you really, really don’t want to get rained on. Anyway, I sat beside the fire and read and listened to the raindrops falling all around me and it was incredibly peaceful. I then turned on the computer, wrote this, and am going to bed.
Happy Canada Day! We knew that it was Canada Day looong before getting to Vancouver, of course. That’s why we planned to arrive in Canada on this patriotic day. Those of you who think we are just winging around the continent with no forethought and just happened to arrive in Canada on Canada Day are dead wrong. Yessir. We thought we’d get there just in time to hear the announcement about the 2010 winter Olympics being held in Vancouver as well. Great timing on our part. And indeed, great timing it was. My brother Eric’s girlfriend, Holly Hayward, was attending a seminar in the Vancouver area and was due to fly back to New Hampshire the following day. So we met her for the first time. She had only been in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, but she already knew the town like a pro. She showed us around the waterfront, the old train station (which has been remodeled and turned into an upscale shopping area) and Gastown. We ate lots of food at a Greek place and had a great time getting to know one another and talking about my brother Eric. After dessert
, we drove Holly down to the airport and settled in at an RV park in South Vancouver. Keep your eyes open for Holly- she will reappear later this year. She is one of the kind people who is Plato-sitting for a spell. Plato, by the way, seems to be doing better. She is still stiff, but she is able to get in and out of the van by herself. She is breathing easier and eating more. She has also regained her habit of looking particularly malnourished when we are eating food that she deems tasty (anything). Today she actually barked at another dog. I think she was nervous to for a while because she knew that if she got into a fight with another dog all she could do was fall on them or barf at them (another incredibly pleasant side effect of her apparent allergy to the medication she was on). So, the news seems to be that we have an old, but not in imminent danger, dog. Plato is grateful for her numerous fan emails and claims that those emails are what pulled her through. Anyway, back to South Vancouver. Here was our first stay in any sort of RV park with “locals.” By locals, I mean people who seem to live in the park. It just seemed a little too close to typical trailer park stereotypes in terms of the people who were there. Very Jerry Springer, if you catch my drift. Beth had a nice early evening and I did about 18 loads of laundry, so we both had a good time.
We woke up and decided to break down and get a giant breakfast, because our typical morning fare up until this point has been instant oatmeal or granola bars. So we went to IHOP in Surrey, which is a suburb of Vancouver. It was actually quite disquieting to find that all of the same stores occupied the same strip malls. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, The Gap, Sears, etc. It is a little scary to think that if some of these corporations get their way, you won’t be able to throw a stone without hitting six of their franchises. It would be a shame if in 50 years someone was writing a journal like this one and all they could talk about was how the Big Mac and Frapuccino in Tulsa differed from those offered in Boston. I will now stop complaining. Anyway, the only thing around was an IHOP and we were dang hungry so we ate. Things don’t seem as inexpensive as I had hoped. Yes, US currency is worth 40% more than Canadian currency, but everything seems about 30% more expensive, dollar-wise. According to Beth, this economic phenomenon is called “Purchasing Power Parity." I call it "A Rip Off." After breakfast, we drove into the city again. I went to Stanley Park, which is Vancouver’s big city park. The gardens were most impressive, and the park was very clean and well landscaped. I met this elderly man who had the coolest paintings in the universe. He was using watercolors, but on a black background. Very clever. I loved his stuff, but he started putting the hard sell on me and that annoyed me, so I left. Beth (who had spent the afternoon researching a place to board Plato for the upcoming weekend) and I then hooked up and we took Rte 99 into North Vancouver. We found our way to The Capilano River, and the rickety suspension bridge which spans it. The suspension bridge, which is made, I believe, of 6 toothpicks and a yard of dental floss, is 450 feet long and resides 230 feet above the river. The bridge was built 110 years ago and I don’t believe it has been looked after since. At least, that’s how it felt when we walked across it
. Beth can be found in a blue jacket looking out over the left side of the bridge. Across the river there were really nice trails that ran through forests of primarily Douglas Fir trees. There was also a spot called “The Thinking Point,” and the way the map was drawn, it looked like The Thinking Point was referring to an outhouse that was alongside of the trail. What better name for a toilet, after all? Farther down the path we found the actual thinking point, however. It was a bench overlooking a pond. After we thought about things for a while we moved on. We played a game of checkers on a board that was carved out from a big tree, and was a popular resting/amusement point for park visitors. Beth missed an easy move in the beginning after I offered up one of my checkers as a positional gambit, but I failed to take advantage, and she was on the way to winning when we had to quit because two women were tapping their feet and sighing loudly, indicating that it was no longer our turn to play. So we hung it up since we couldn’t concentrate any more, but I have to give Beth the victory. We stayed in another RV park in the Vancouver city limits.
Today was busy, busy, busy! First, we dropped Plato off at Noah’s Barque, a doggie day care facility in North Vancouver. She has been much better lately and we felt confident in her health. Confident, that is, that she could lie around in a dog bed all day eating doggie bon-bons. Not confident that she could walk around Vancouver Island with us all day. So she went on a vacation from Beth and me. We drove down to Tsawwassen (I still don’t know how you pronounce it), which is a few miles south of Vancouver proper, and took a ferry to one of Vancouver Island’s principal attractions, the city of Victoria. The ferry ride over was about 90 minutes. The ferry itself was humongous. There were 6 decks, four of which were for vehicular traffic. There were hundreds of cars that drove on to the ferry. Why were these people so foolish as to want to bring a car to Victoria? The reason, we soon found out, was that Victoria is sort of a catch-all term used to describe a peninsula the size of Mars at the southwestern end of Vancouver Island. It’s sort of like saying “The Bay Area,” which includes San Francisco and about 500 square miles around it. So we got dropped off at one end of this peninsula and quickly deduced from the line of cars speeding off the ferry away from us that we were standing on the end of the peninsula that was known as “lame,” and we wanted to get to the other end of the peninsula, called “20 miles away.” No problem, however, thanks to British Columbia’s thriving bus system. We got a pass and got on one of those double-decker buses like they have in London and headed off to our first stop, The Butchart Gardens. This is a private garden started about 100 years ago by Mr. and Mrs. R.P. Butchart. He was in the rock business and after his company took all of the rock out of this quarry, Mrs. Butchart told him their yard looked hideous, so they decided to beautify it by planting 2 of every plant in the world over an 800 square cubit area. Wait, maybe I'm getting my stories confused. Today it is a 130-acre garden, boasting the typical garden types (rose, Italian, Japanese, bee-infested) and many exotic plants from all over the globe. We wandered around the gardens for a couple of hours
and took some lovely pictures
. We then took another bus to downtown Victoria. We saw the capital buildings, the waterfront and some of the local scenery. It seemed a really nice place to be. Not too hectic, but still a good bit going on. We then caught another big double-decker bus back to the ferry, but that’s not all. When we got on the ferry, we were planning to eat at the ferry’s cafeteria, which had decent food for an ok price. But Beth suggested we go to the Pacific Buffet, which is a must on your way back from Victoria. 30 Canadian bucks, or about 24 US greenbacks, bought us a pretty good buffet, replete with salads, entrees and desserts. And the best part was that they stuck us next to a window and we got to watch the sun set over the islands and ocean as we were sailing back to Vancouver
. Now THIS is vacationing! Once we hit land, we got back in the van and headed up to Whistler, which is basically a resort town about 90 minutes past Vancouver on Rte 99. When we got there, we were just planning to stay in another RV park, but the one we were planning to stay in had closed up for the night, and, and this is the part that killed me, they had also locked up the bathrooms. Now, normally I could just go visit the bushes, if you catch my drift, but it seems that your humble narrator had caught a little illness which included a need that the bushes wouldn’t work for. So, we checked into The Best Western right in the heart of Whistler Village. It’s not called The Best Western, it’s called something else, but, folks, it’s a Best Western. So we checked in at 3am and your humble narrator got some much-needed rest.
We slept in until about 10 today. It was sooo nice. Spending most of our time in a tent or an RV with seriously tentlike qualities, we had been waking up often with the sun. That sun, lemme tell ya, gets up darn early. And since we had a very long day yesterday, we gluttonously slept in until we decided to get up. We ate breakfast, then I came up to our room and slept some more until 3:30 pm. I felt a little better today, but still not 100%. After that, I met up with Beth (who had spent the day wandering about the shops at Whistler Village), and we went to see Terminator 3. Not so hot. It was basically a 90-minute car chase. Also, you could predict the ending about 5 minutes into the thing. The whole terminator thing, in your humble movie reviewer’s opinion, should not have gotten any farther than T2, an all-around entertaining film. While on the subject of reviews, Beth finished “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold (I think that’s how to spell her name), and had this to say: “It was a very good book. I don’t think readers should be deterred by the gruesome aspect of the main character/narrator having been brutally murdered. The main character tells her story from Heaven, which I really enjoyed the author’s portrayal of.” She is now reading The Celestine Prophecy. Updates to follow. Earlier today she tried to burn some credit card receipts (in lieu of having a paper shredder) in our hotel room’s bathroom sink. Now our room has all of the sights, sounds and smells of a newspaper fire without the benefit of the light and the heat. And she stopped after the first few, on account of the billowing smoke, so we still have more credit card receipts to dispose of.
Your humble narrator was, alas, still incapacitated, though perhaps for a reason. Every time your humble narrator sets foot on a ski slope he seems to get seriously injured. The last time it was a concussion at a Lake Tahoe resort. When I woke up, I thought I was at a ski resort in New York and I couldn’t remember who I was up there with. So my plans to mountain bike didn’t materialize, though perhaps for the better. I spent a lot of time reading about HTML and by next week we hope to have a website up so that instead of receiving our updates via email, you can just visit our website and get the scoop. Beth had an active day, however. She tried a new twist on Eco-Hiking, called “Ziptrek”. You can learn more about it at here.. (The following commentary provided by Beth.) As far as we know, this activity doesn’t exist anywhere else yet, and the 3 guys who started it in Whistler have only had their business running for about a year. They installed 5 “zip lines” that run throughout a natural rainforest near Whistler mountain. The zip lines are cables that are high above the valley floor, and they each run between 2 platforms that are high up in the tree tops. You wear a rock climbing harness that has 2 ropes attached (one main line & one backup). The guide clips the end of your ropes to a pulley, and then the pulley gets clipped to the cable. And then you leap off the platform and ride the cable across to the other side! The views were spectacular, the ride is thrilling, and all the while you get to learn neat stuff about the rainforest. The only downside is that the amount of actual time spent riding the cables isn’t that long; sort of like skydiving, where the freefall is the best part & the shortest part of the whole experience. After Beth got back from her Ziptrekking outing, we met for dinner at the Mongolie Grill in Whistler Village, which gets 5 stars. At the Mongolie Grill, you pay by the poundage of food on your plate, which you get to carefully choose yourself, from their extensive dinner bar. You fill a bowl with your choice of meat, seafood, veggies, noodles and sauces. Then a Mongolian chef (or a Canadian teenager wearing a black chef apron and hat) weighs your bowl and dumps the contents on the big round griddle. They have about 12 dinners going at one time, and the chefs move clockwise around the grill. They each take a turn chopping and stirring the ingredients of each diner’s meal, constantly taking the longest cooked meal off the grill and replacing it with the next bowl of raw ingredients. When your meal is the one that’s been on the longest in the rotation, they put it all on a plate for you and your take it back to your table to enjoy. Delish! Back at the hotel we began packing up our things as our 3-night stay in Whistler drew to an end. Tomorrow we’ll pick Plato up in Vancouver and head south back to the U.S. (Washington state).
TRIVIA CONTEST WINNER: Vaughan Scully was the first to correctly identify Portland as “The City of Roses.” The climate there is just perfect for roses, and almost every house has a whole mess of rose bushes blooming merrily out front, complete with weapons-grade thorns which are perfect for tearing the skin off the shins of innocent cyclists just trying to ride off their Red Robin desserts. For winning the contest, Vaughan gets a nice compliment, and here goes:
“Vaughan Scully, father and husband without peer, is a gentleman and a scholar, and his good looks are exceeded only by his sparkling personality.”
THIS WEEK’S TRIVIA QUESTION: What is a dollar called in Canada?
EXTRA CREDIT: Why is it called this?
BATHROOM NOTICE OF THE WEEK: “Please do not throw cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light.”
COMING UP NEXT WEEK: Northern Washington, Idaho, Montana, Glacier National Park, and finally Jackson, WY and our friends Laura and Ted Ladd therein, who have graciously offered to Plato-sit for a while.