No Net, No Posts...
Sorry about my lollyblogger-ness but I haven't had a net connection for longer than 15 minutes (where I checked other blogs) since the last post. So I now I'll update y'all on the rest of the honeymoon and since (many on you will have heard about it, but this is mostly for posterity) .
Tuesday, October 5 - Wet, yet again...
This was our day to go shopping in Vancouver. We went down to Gastown and picked up many souvenirs and saw the Steam Clock. It was drizzling the whole time but was fairly fun anyway.
One of the most remarkable things (to me) about downtown Van are the pedestrians. They have no respect for traffic flow. I can't count the number of times that a car would miss judge the space available on the other side of an intersection (ending up blocking the cross road), the light would change, the cars wouldn't move ahead quickly enough, the pedestrians would start across the crosswalk before the car in the intersection could clear it, thereby blocking the cross traffic. It was crazy.
Davyd and I decided before we left Edmonton that we needed new hats (and since you can't buy a decent hat in our beloved city), we would look whilst honeymooning. We went to I Love Hats on Broadway, parked our car at a meter a couple of blocks away and put in enough money in for 2 hours. I bought a lovely top hat and my boy got 2 fedoras (he couldn't decide between the black and the grey so he went with both). On the way back to the car we stopped for lunch.
While we were eating it started to rain. We bundled ourselves up as best as possible (I got out the umbrella) and started back to the car. When we got to the end of the block we had parked on, we stopped. "Where's the car. I'm sure we parked on this block. Yes, there's the orca we parked beside." We walked back to the meter, it still had 40 minutes left. But it also had a sign stating that it was a no parking zone from 3:00 to 6:00 pm. We had parked at about 2:00. They had towed our car!!! Davyd called the number on the pole and got the address for the impound lot. It was only about 10 blocks away. We decided we could walk that far; it would be an adventure!
We started down the street and soon realized we'd be crossing the Grandville Street Bridge. It was cool. Cold even. The wind was really blowing in up that high and it was raining really hard. The wind actually turned my umbrella inside-out (I thought that only happened in movies). But we did get a really good look at the Kids' Only Market from above and saw a cute little harbour ferry.
Eventually, did get to the lot and $85 later had our car back.
That evening we went to my Uncle's for dinner with his family. They recently moved from Edmonton to Coquitlam. Their new house is beautiful and we had fun talking and playing games.
The drive was 'interesting'. It took us an hour and a half to drive to Coquitlam and 20 minutes to drive back to Vancouver. We took the same route. The difference: Traffic. They have these crazy pedestrian lights that change right when you push the button, regardless of what the other lights on the road are doing. It makes traffic very start-stop. "Freeway" doesn't seem to be part of that reality.
That evening I also started to get a sore throat...
Wednesday, Oct. 6
Wednesday, we planned to take the ferry to the Island.
I woke up with a really sore throat, swollen glands and a cough. Yay. I was getting sick on my honeymoon. Oh the romance...
We checked out of the hotel early and went to the mall in search of Buckley's and Tylenol. And to look for some more souvenirs. And some CDs to listen to in the car. We were given a HMV gift certificate and had forgotten to pack any discs.
Our ferry was leaving from Horseshoe Bay for Nanimo. We drove up the coastal road and since we had lots of time, stopped at Lighthouse Park. When I was at camp, my friends and I spent a lazy day there climbing the rocks and picnicing. Davyd and I walked down one of the paths through the forest toward the lighthouse. Lighthouse park is on a penisula covered in old growth forest. The trees are huge (we saw one with a diameter larger than my armspan) and the whole place smells wet and alive. It was an amazing experience. Our pictures really don't do it justice.
The lighthouse was also really cool. Very much the classic white and red lighthouse.
The ferry ride was a ferry ride. I'm a little jaded about BC Ferries after having ridden on them most weekends for 2 summers with 60 screaming 7-12 year olds. The ride with Davyd was much quieter. There were a tour group of Japanese students on board but they weren't my responsibility. :)
The neatest part of the ferry ride was the seagulls. There were about 10 of them that followed the boat all the way across the Strait. Seagulls are surprisingly graceful birds, when they aren't scavenging McDonald's leftovers from parking lots in land locked cities.
The drive down to Victoria from Nanimo was beautiful. The mountains and the trees and the water. Sigh. There are several mismatched bridges along that stretch of Highway 1. I imagine they come from the highway having been a single lane in each direction and then building a new, different style of bridge for the twin. (Wow, that sentence doesn't make that much sense!)
Our room in Victoria was a nice normal hotel room and I was very glad to fall in to bed that night. It was a long day and I was getting sicker...
