Oh Canada

So unlike several fortunate cousins of mine, and practically half of my classmates, I am not enjoying/will not shortly enjoy being able to gallivant about Europe :( On the bright side, however, I am having a splendid vacay this week in a super swanky condo on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, with Mike and his parents.

(picture from the website of the unit we're staying in... it looks exactly like this)

In fact, from where I sit right now, I can see the Pacific Ocean... the beach seriously starts twenty feet from the back door.

The crazy part, though, is how close we came to not being here at all. First, there was the unfortunate combination of math errors, the lack of a map, and Chicago rush hour traffic that got us to the boarding gate at Midway right as they were announcing the last call for "Shaw, party of two" over the loudspeakers.

We got on the plane with seconds to spare, flew too and navigated through Seattle, and then stood in the longest line ever known to mankind at the Greyhound station, where we wolfed down our only real meal of the day (tacos from the shop next door) and watched a drunk homeless man get ejected from the women's rest room by a harried security guard.

(not the actual line at the Greyhound station, obviously... ours was much longer)

When the bus stopped at the border, we assumed the process would just involve a simple check to make sure we both had passports. Turns out Canadian border patrol officers are a bit more hardcore. We were grilled about our plans, and only cleared to enter the country with great trepidation - the officer was worried that we were indigents who would spend what little cash we had in Canada and then be stranded in the country and drain their welfare system dry. Two of the other people on our bus, both of whom had passports, were actually turned away. We certainly would have been if we weren't going to meet Mike's parents, who, as we assured the security guard, had a car and enough cash to fill it with gas and drive us back to the States.

The Greyhound dropped us off in Vancouver (beautiful city, by the way) where we had to navigate the bus and metro system with all of our luggage, making a series of connections that brought us 100 kilometers outside the city and took us several hours.

In the meantime, we befriended a British med-student/rock-climber, who desperately needed the twenty dollars of cash we had to be able to pay the airport security fee to get home (sort of sounds like a scam, I know, but we have his phone number and email address and talked with him for forever... he was legit). Then, penniless (well, we did have debit and credit cards and a Canadian nickle we found on the floor) we took a ferry over to Vancouver Island, where we were picked up by Mike's parents and got back to the condo at 1:30 in the morning. Which, Eastern Time, would have been 4:30 in the morning... which is impressive considering we had gotten up at 5:00 that day.

But we made it! And it's beautiful here! And although it may not be Europe, the people here do have cool accents, and I get to see a bunch of stuff on loan from the British Museum when we go down to Victoria tomorrow. Plus, I'm betting Europe doesn't have Nanaimo Bars...