We had an uneventful trip up. We didn't do great with our audiobook choices for the trip, but did manage to find something to listen more or less pleasantly. The boarder crossing went okay, but I felt flustered. The crossing guard had a lot of questions for us regarding why we were going, where we were staying, details of this "circus school" and a few other thing, all fired at me in a rather aggressive way. Shesh. I was glad to be through.
I hadn't written out directions on how to get to the hotel, feeling fairly confident I could manage it from the pretrip planning I'd done looking at maps and such. However, I confused one body of water for another and thought we had to go to a very different place than planned. We ended up going within blocks of the hotel before heading out to a suburb, only to realize my mistake and navigate back to the hotel.
While we were on this little driving tour of Vancouver, we drove by a park at which Davan asked if we could stop. We only had some vague ideas of things we'd do in Vancouver other than go to the audition and, thus, were prepared to flow through our trip, so we stopped.
Davan was rather thrilled with the set up of this park.
When we arrived at the hotel, which I'd booked through Priceline, getting quite a deal, we were disappointing to find that the parking was quite difficult (we would have exited out the rear hatch if we could have opened it from inside the van, as it was, it was quite a squeeze to get out the sliding door) and was an extra $15 a night. Oh well.
We got up to our room and...well, we were disappointed about that, too. It was an oddly shaped room with no great place to put our bags, a refrigerator that didn't work, no microwave that was supposed to be there, a view of the other U of the hotel about 10 feet away out the windows, an overwhelming chemical smell and windows that didn't appear to open. We did discover that the bathroom window opened, which, at that point, seemed like the best thing about the room:
Davan enjoyed sticking her head out many times over the course of our stay.
Not being thrilled with the room, we headed out to walk, even though it was raining pretty hard at this point.
Davan, looking rather distressed by the weather:
Actually, she handled it well, really. We walked over a bridge that was just a few blocks away, which was a great, high bridge. We spent some time looking down at the ferries below and timing how long it took our spit to fall, I must also admit:
We'd been talking about catching a ferry after walking a bit, but ended up altering our walk to be able to catch one of the rainbow ferries rather than going to the original choice of ferry stop that only had blue ferries.
On the way to the ferry stop, we found this fountain, which required some frolicking on before we could move on.
When we got down to the ferry dock, I realized that I didn't have any cash nor was there a machine at which to buy tickets - it's all done by cash on the boats. We were going to just walk away, but the ferry operator asked if we wanted to get on and I explained the problem. He kindly offered to let us ride to the next stop where there was an ATM and then pay when we went on, so we hoped onboard.
The next stop was Granville Island, where we've actually been before a couple times, but both times Davan was too young to remember. We walked around the Public Market there, debating making a purchase, as we were pretty hungry, but we had a restaurant picked out that we were headed to and quite a ways to walk, precluding us wanting to carry much around, so we didn't. After using the ATM, we went back down to the ferry to wait:
And it wasn't long before our next ride showed up:
We rode to the other end of False Creek, where we got off and made our way to Gorilla Food, our choice for dinner. We circled the stadium on the way and Davan had to get her photo with the large "D" marking the D entrance.
Davan was second guessing the choice of a raw food place on the cold, wet walk there as she was feeling like something warm would be nice. However, once we were there, in the nice warm restaurant, the room temperature food was just fine. We got a slice of pizza and a burger with a side of coleslaw to share:
I liked the food well enough. Davan liked the pizza quite well, but, overall, didn't feel like the raw food really satisfied her, even with a slice of chocolate pie to finish off with. She won't be a raw food convert.
We headed back out into to discover that it was no longer raining, but it was quite cold, so that we still wanted our hoods up for the walk back to the hotel.
We got there, made ourselves comfortable, and had time for a couple of hands of cards and some reading before we turned out the lights.
When we did settle into bed, I found myself looking much more favorably on the hotel, as the beds were quite comfortable with decent pillows and nice duvets. Shockingly, as I'm not usually good at sleeping away from home the first night, I feel nearly right asleep and slept pretty well most of the night.
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