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This was pretty much your standard normal first day of travel… In fact, we can’t even really call it a day of travel… It’s more like the lead up to a real day of travel… Marie went to work for the morning and ran a couple of errands before dropping Bear off with her sister Vicki who will be looking after him for the next two weeks (thank you Vicki!). I went in to work for the morning to tidy up my classroom and wish a few people a Happy Holiday (there’s no classes on this day… and even if there had been I doubt that I would have had many students given that last night was the annual Winter Grad dinner and dance… I’m sure there were a number of grads very much appreciating the fact that there were no classes today).
Once home, I repacked a few things and finished cleaning the house while Marie finished up at work… I realized that I’d probably packed a few too many cooler weather items as it’s been downright cold and miserable here in Victoria the last couple of days (the shortest days of the year combined with the first decent winter storm of the season has made things pretty dark and dreary recently) and while we’re not going to be sweltering in the tropics on this trip, the weather is forecast to be pretty consistently in the high teens with a couple of days getting into the low 20s… so not much need for the lightweight puffy down jacket I’d been planning to take (and which Marie is still bringing). Then I spent some time setting up some random-ish schedules for lights to come on around the house and basically just puttered while waiting for Marie to finish up.
If it seems like there’s not much to say here, you’re right. Despite leaving most of this trip to pretty much the last minute, this is probably the most prepared we’ve ever been for a trip. Part of that is probably due to having done this travel thing more than once and we’ve figured out pretty much all the “routines” of what to bring, etc. It also helps that all our travel stuff is kept in one place these days and is pretty much ready to go. The biggest reason we were in pretty good shape for this trip, though, was work-related for Marie… Turns out the massive reorganization she’s been working on for the past seven months and that was supposed to happen on December 11 – and that would have required her to work pretty much 24 hours a day for the two weeks prior – was postponed by the other company… leaving her with a whole lot more extra time than we’d been banking on. Instead of the usual mad scramble to take care of a thousand last minute work issues, Marie has been downright relaxed heading into this trip.
We left our house precisely at 4:00 to walk the 250 metres to the bus stop near our house in order to catch the first of two buses we’d be taking to the ferry. We have never – and I mean never – left on time for any trip we have ever done… In this case, we actually ended up missing an earlier bus by less than a minute… turns out Marie can walk pretty quick despite the fact her leg is still pretty gimpy after breaking it 10 months ago. Catching that earlier bus might have saved a few minutes of aggravation as the carefully Googled route/times we’d been counting on suddenly up and disappeared a few minutes after we arrived at the bus stop… turns out the bus we’d planned to catch would be 17 minutes later than planned… which would make us miss the second bus we needed to catch… which would get us to the ferry about 35 minutes after our planned ferry had left… Grrr. There was cussing on my part. But then it turned out that wasn’t going to be the case after all and that the bus was just a few minutes late and if we hustled we’d still be able to make the bus to the ferry… There was more cussing. It seems that a big part of the confusion was my fault… I’d mistakenly entered our route into Apple Maps instead of Google Maps when checking it at the bus stop… and apparently Apple Maps has absolutely no fecking clue what the Victoria Transit system is up to… For a company whose goal is (or at least was) to make things that “just work” their maps app has a long, long ways to go before I’d ever rely on it for directions at home or abroad.
It all ended well, though, and soon we were piling onto the bus… the driver seemed a bit amused (I think I was reading that emotion correctly) when we pulled out a small stack of bus tickets we’d purchased for Caitlin… when she was in middle school… Turns out she’d left a bunch of them in a backpack in her room when she left for university – and Marie, being the frugal person she is [so, Marie is taking exception to the use of the word frugal here… I would have used cheap but that seemed mean… she’s saying it’s “responsible”… I say frugal is pretty accurate…] found them and hung onto them “just in case…” Turns out they were still valid and saved us $7.50 off the $10 bus fare to the ferry… Good job Marie!
It’s about 5 stops from our place to the transfer point and – aside from being pretty crowded and very damp (it’s been raining hard for more than 24 hours) it all passed routinely and we were soon hustling to make the next bus… which was also running late… And which turned out to be quite spectacularly full. Our driver took full advantage of the recently completed bus-only lanes and we were soon on the open highway (if you’ve ever driven the Pat Bay highway at rush hour you will see that I’m being wildly ironic here)… We stopped a couple of times along the way and somehow managed to cram a bunch more people and their assorted packs, bike parts and suitcases into the already pretty packed space. If the bus started out a few minutes behind schedule, our driver more than made up the lost time by hitting warp speed on the few stretches where traffic wasn’t backed up… I did not know buses could go that fast… especially on a dark and extremely rainy day. Marie managed to find a seat a few rows back from the front of the bus… I was standing right at the front the entire trip and spent a good portion of the ride wondering if Marie’s bag was big enough to cushion the impact when I ended up crashing through the front window of the bus if someone stupidly tried to merge in front of us… If you’ve ever seen the movie Speed, you’ll remember the scenes where Keanu gets the bus up on two wheels going around corners a few times… yeah… apparently our bus driver thought that he’d give that a try on the final corner heading into the ferry terminal… an area with a speed limit of 30 km/hr… which apparently does not remotely apply to BC transit drivers on a mission… I think we’d all have applauded if we’d had enough space around us to clap our hands…
We arrived at the ferry about 10 minutes earlier than we’d expected and were soon relaxing (there’s that irony again) in the BC Ferries departure lounge… along with a significant portion of Victoria’s population and an entire luggage shop’s inventory of rolling suitcases… We shuffled onto the ferry with the rest of the herd and made our way to the surprisingly deserted cafeteria (surprising because we were traveling right over dinner time) where we dined (there’s that pesky irony again) on White Spot chicken strips and a BC (bacon cheddar) chicken burger. It filled us up… That’s really about all one can say about it… It’s not good. It does not hit the “spot.” It is not remotely cheap. There might have been heartburn…
By the time we were done with “dinner” we had about 30 minutes to kill so we purchased Compass cards for the bus on the Vancouver side (thanks to a tip from our friend Trent who works for the ferries) so that we wouldn’t be stuck at the back of the line for the bus… That might not have been such a bad thing as we ended up being about 4th in line for the bus… which meant a nice long time standing in the rain that was falling pretty steadily… while the nice warm bus idled away about 75 metres away… I’m sure there’s a good reason for leaving the bus to idle while people stand out in the rain… In the end, we got a seat and were soon on our way so can’t really complain too much… If you live on the West Coast and spend much time complaining about time spent in the rain you’re sort of missing the point…
The trip from the ferry to our hotel took about 40 minutes and we were soon piling out into the rain again to make the 7-8 minute walk from Bridgeport Station to the Abercorn Inn… It’s a bit of an odd duck hotel that is conveniently located near the airport. An odd duck because it started life as a sort of Scottish-themed hotel (kind of like the Waddling Dog in Victoria if any of you are familiar with it), but now it’s sort of a generic chain hotel with a Chinese restaurant where there used to be a pub… Cultural disconnects notwithstanding, it’s reasonably priced, has an airport shuttle, includes breakfast (unless like us you’re leaving before 6:30am), is spotlessly clean and was very quiet for being so close to the airport and the highway. It also had one of the largest bathroom and showers of any hotel we’ve ever stayed in… go figure…
We spent a few minutes squaring away our stuff for our very full day of flying tomorrow, grabbed a shower so we could sleep in a little longer and called it a night. In all, a successful first day of travel. But then we were only catching a ferry and going to a hotel so not the most complicated day of travel we’ve ever had…
