We got up bright and early that Friday morning (so early that we had to wake Sophie up, which, as I am sure everyone knows, breaks the cardinal rule of baby-raising: never wake a sleeping baby!). Our car service guy (Dennis, who reminds me of someone's Jewish grandpa from New York. Not *my* Jewish grandpa from New York, but somebody else's) showed up on time, or actually, a bit early. Dennis is a morning person, apparently. Not so much, me. Anyway, Dennis kept us awake on the quick drive to the airport, and we got there, and checked our bags with no problem. We booked before Alaska Air started charging for bags, so no stupid fees there, and we managed to masterfully balance our weight, so one back was 47 lbs., and the other was 48 lbs. (the garment bag was 30-something lbs., but it only fits so much). Then, we hung around in the airport, and waited to board. We actually preboarded, which was excellent, because it gave us time to get the 5000 lb. baby seat put in before people wanted to get past us to their seats. OK, maybe not 5000 lbs., but close enough. we actually rigged up one of the collapsing luggage cart things with a bungie cord to roll the seat through the airport because it weighs so much. Anyway, we boarded, got it in place, stowed our stuff, and took our seats.
The flight was fairly uneventful. Sophie was fairly well behaved, though she slept for a whole 15 minutes on the six hour flight. Yes, 15 minutes. Sigh. Oh well. I hate that airlines charge for food now, but Alaska did have cute little snack boxes that you could buy that had a good variety of stuff in them, at least. Hmm, what else? Oh, I know. We bought Sophie a special toy for the trip that we whipped out on the plane - we got her a Magnadoodle. She *loved* the Magnadoodle. Second best thing we bought for the trip (behind the luggage cart for the car seat). Kept her entertained on the plane, and at various other key times on the trip - long dinners, long train rides, long bus rides, you get the idea...
So we were flying into Seattle, then driving from there to Vancouver, with a quick stop for diapers (why waste space in the luggage with diapers when we could just pick them up on the other end)? We got into Seattle with no issues, and aside from some brief confusion trying to get to the rental car place (the garage at the Seattle airport is, um, elevator-tastic), got on the road. There were lots of mountains, something Sophie hasn't seen much of. We actually saw Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens from the plane, which was kind of cool. Sophie fell asleep pretty quickly in the car, and slept for an hour or so - actually, this worked out well, because with such a late nap, it helped to shift her to the new timezone. We hit a little traffic on the way out of Seattle (road construction, seems to be a universal problem), and stopped a Target in lovely Marysville, WA, and made our way to the border.
We had a lot of luggage. that doesn't even include the car seat.
The space needle!
Mountains!The border crossing was actually beautiful - looks like they rebuilt it recently, and it had lovely gardens & whatnot. Very nice. The border guard guy was humorless, but efficient, and we were soon on our way in Canada, eh.
The park at the border crossing, very pretty...Things were moving along fine, and we were, oh, a half hour from our final destination (we thought), when traffic slowed. Or should I say, stopped? Well, yeah, stopped. See, Vancouver is an island, and to get on to it, you either need to go over a bridge, or through a tunnel. Our route took us through a tunnel, specifically the George Massey Tunnel. A tunnel, which for some unknown reason, the fine folks of Canada had rejiggered so that one lane of traffic was going into the city, and three lanes were coming out. So we went down from 5 lanes of traffic to one. ONE. We were stuck there for a loooooooong time.
A Canadian corn field, just for Amy...
George Massey Tunnel: Five lanes go in...one comes out.Eventually, we made it through, and toured some of downtown Vancouver on our way to the hotel, which we finally reached after, oh, five hours in our car. Dad was actually outside when we got to the hotel, and helped us unload, and Steve went to drop off the rental car a few blocks away, after he checked us in. We were on some poshy club floor because Steve is an Elite Marriott person, and we had a lovely view of the water - I watched the seaplanes for a while; they were quite cool. Before long, Amy & eventually David joined us, and we headed to dinner, which Amy has already described. Though I do have to say, that place had some damn fine house-cured bacon (I had a BLT, i wish I had three). After dinner, we went to bed. We were tired. It had been a long day, and we had lots of excitement to look forward to the next day...
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