Diane in Vancouver Feb 8-12 2008

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I had a chance to go out to Vancouver to visit my sister a few weeks ago. We rode around the city on the bus and took in the sights… and food that Van had to offer. The weather was fine, with not too many rainy periods and even a few hours of blue sky! Carrie has gotten lucky with a really nice little townhouse with good landlords and roommates who call her to find out where she is if she isn’t home on time, which is really nice of them. I also got to meet Trio, who is a very pretty grey striped cat. We spent the mornings sleeping or reading and making porridge for breakfast – I discovered that the girls have quite a large collection of books that appeal to me between them, which they very kindly shared.

We did the most important things first – a walk on the beach and a trip to the cupcake store downtown by the harbour where they have the international fireworks competitions. Those little cupcakes are expensive, but very fun with all the different flavours they have. Carrie was also adamant that she wanted to take me to try some fancy hot chocolate at a place which is conveniently located right beside the cupcake shop. Care had some creamy milk chocolate, and I had dark “mexican” hot chocolate with some spicy cayenne or other pepper in it – very tasty!

Carrie took me to the site where she was a movie extra for a few days - she was ten feet from Keanu Reeves and some other girl. It was a pretty non-descript lot - I wonder how it was chosen.

On Friday night we all went down to Granville Island to watch some Theatresports. The improv was some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The actors were experienced and totally on fire, and we all appreciated a chance to laugh. My favorite skit was built around a squeaky spot that one of the actors had found in the floor of the stage. It reminded me how much fun I have at improv nights – I’ll have to try and make it out again soon! Afterward, we went to a tapas place by the entrance to Granville Island called The Cat’s Meow for their sweet potato fries. I had some crab cakes that were really good too.

The next day Care and I went back again for the market. I really love it there, even though it’s crowded beyond my liking. I like to see vendors selling directly to their customers, and there are so many fresh and exciting products to be had. Carrie and I munched on some turkey sausage and rosemary bread with herbed butter and strolled from shop to shop. We visited a dive shop, a stationary store, a store that sold natural dyeing supplies…

I felt I had to show Carrie a restaurant that Morgan and I had found in the summer called Memphis Blues. There’s a couple of them in Vancouver, but the only one I’ve been to is on East Broadway. The “Memphis Feast” only comes to about $30 or $35 and you get a year’s supply of meat with bbq sauce and cornbread. Morgan’s skillet cornbread is much better, I think, but I love the pulled pork. Two times I’ve been, and two times I’ve left with a considerably large doggie bag. Ah, meat.

Carrie’s roomy lent us her car, a cute little Honda called “Josh”, to do a grocery shop on Sunday morning, and I got some split green peas and sausage so we could boil up a mess o’ comfort food. You could stand a spoon up in it – a real big spoon!

Well, there was even more to do – we tried on potential bridesmaids’ dresses and found a style Carrie liked and played with hairstyles for me. It’s been a while since I had my hair in curlers. We made some tasty cookies and Care opened birthday presents from home. Carrie’s roommate drove us out to Deep Cove and we walked around on the dock and ate some sushi in a warm little place nearby. Mmm, west coast sushi!

Eventually, it was time for Carrie to get to rehearsal and me to head back to the airport. Unfortunately, I never made it to a runthrough of Wedding of the Year, but I did have plenty of time to admire the artwork displayed in the Van International. The stone carving is lovely, and the whalebone work is actually pretty imaginative. I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure.

Anyway, it’s business as usual for me again, but I have enjoyed my excursions to the coast the last little while. That makes 3 Vancouver trips for me in the last 12 months.

Skiing in Banff

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A week after Diane and I went on the CS Department ski trip, we ventured out for another trip with a couple of friends to Canmore for another ski trip! Kepi, Rob, Diane and I all took Friday off to head out around noon for Canmore. We had a reservation at the Canmore Inn and Suites with a pretty good deal - lift tickets included in our nightly rate. We arrived in Canmore around 5:00 and got ourselves checked in. All of us were incredibly hungry so instead of going hunting for good food we ended up eating at the neighbouring Smitty's restaurant. It was a poor decision I think, but our stomachs were pretty firm about getting food in them soon. It was a relaxing evening on Friday. We hung out at the hotel, and watched the hockey game, and then went to bed relatively early so we could get an early start the next morning.

We got an early start on Saturday driving roughly an hour to Lake Louise, which was our first mountain destination. Then we threw on our equipment and got on the hill. I hadn't been to Lake Louise yet, so my first impression was that the mountain was quite large! My mountain skiing destinations include Marmot, Kimberley and Panorama but Lake Louise sure seemed bigger than anywhere I'd been so far. The snow was really quite good, although it would have been nice if the sun had come out. It did make an appearance later in the day, but only briefly. It was gray and snowy for most of the day.

I spent most of the morning trying to keep up with Kepi and Rob while Diane spent the morning going down some greens and blues. I'm starting to think I should take some skiing lessons because I really am not all that good at skiing the more difficult runs. I'm pretty good at a nice green or blue run. I can even gain a little speed. A steep black run is challenging, but I can usually get down okay. Anything with moguls though I have a lot of problems with. I've managed to get some tips, but it might be good just to spend some time with some real instruction to improve my skillz.

Anyways, after lunch I spent a bunch of time skiing with Diane. My knees were starting to feel it after pushing it a bit on some moguls earlier in the day so I decided with another day of skiing to go that it was probably a good idea to go a little easier in the afternoon. It was a very enjoyable finish to the day on the slopes.

We returned to the hotel and relaxed for awhile before heading out for dinner. Since we weren't very familiar with the local restaurants, and we wanted to avoid another Smitty's, we asked the hotel staff to recommend something. Among the list was a local microbrewery and pub called the Grizzly Paw. This is a pretty nice little place to go! The food was quite good, the atmosphere was great, and they brew their own beer! It's kind of like Canmore's version of Brewsters. One of the things I really liked was most of their burgers and other platters included both fries and a salad. And it was a very tasty salad too! After dinner and a full day of skiing, we were pretty tired so the evening was pretty uneventful. We pretty much went straight for bed so we could be ready for the next day of skiing.

The next morning was absolutely gorgeous as we made our way to Sunshine. This was another new hill to me, and I was absolutely astounded at how much there was to ski there. With the sun shining, the scenery was absolutely gorgeous: you could see right across the expansive terrain. The slopes were also not that busy - I guess a bunch of people were home watching the super bowl or something. I wasn't complaining too much! I spent some of the morning skiing on my own since Kepi and Rob had taken off earlier and Diane went in to go warm up and adjust her boots. So I did several runs on my own and got myself warmed up. I'm really glad my knees felt good at that point because I sure wanted to be able to make the most of my day there!

We met up for lunch, and then headed back out to the sunny slopes where I joined Rob and Kepi for some more difficult skiing. We got in a few more runs before heading to the car and heading back home.

The drive home was pretty uneventful for the most part until we got onto highway 2 where we found ourselves behind a cop car going about 120 km/h down the highway. Thus began a very entertaining bit of time where cars would go speeding past us on the left hand lane and brake suddenly when they saw the cop car. Pretty soon there was a line of several cars all trailing this cop car. It was pretty effective at keeping people driving at a safe speed! All in all it was a very enjoyable weekend!

Skiing

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This past weekend was the annual computer science department ski trip. Every year, a large portion of the computer science department goes to jasper for a weekend of skiing, hiking, and games. It was a pretty fun trip, but we had quite a "fun" time coming back in near blizzard conditions. Diane and I took the day off and had a relaxing Friday morning. We then got in the car and headed on out to Jasper in the early afternoon. We arrived just in time to relax some more before joining some of our friends who had headed out quite a bit earlier for dinner. The place they picked out was a little Italian restaurant on the upper floor of one of the buildings in Jasper so we wandered down there and ate a pretty decent meal. Four of us split an "Italian Feast" which was two different styles of pasta with some meatballs and sausage. It was pretty tasty and quite filling.

After dinner we returned to the hotel where we played some rock band (Curtis had brought his 360 from Edmonton to play), and then we wandered down to the basement of the hotel where quite a few people were playing games. Deciding to abandon rock band for the night, we sat down with a game called Barbarossa (although we played a variant that Michael Bowling created called Play-Doh's cave (RulesScoresheet). That was pretty fun. I found that I was pretty good at coming up with decently difficult riddles, but not very good at guessing other people's riddles.

After games we retired to bed because we were going to get an early start to go skiing the next day. The ski hill was quite good actually, but the weather wasn't ideal. Fog started to settle in pretty early and then it began to snow more and more heavily as the day progressed. Still, it wasn't too cold to keep us off the slopes so we spent much of the day skiing with Michael B, Nathan, and Joel.

Upon returning to the hotel we found that Curtis, Simone, Mike and Jess who hadn't gone skiing had made us a reservation for dinner at the hotel buffet. That was quite an enjoyable dinner actually -- there was a lot of good food there including some maple cedar planked salmon that was absolutely amazing as well as some roast beef that was incredibly tender. Mmm - tasty food.

After dinner we were ready to play some games. Curtis setup rock band in one of the two games rooms and that was quite a hit. Diane and I would stop in there a couple times during the night to play a bit, but for the most part we let people play who hadn't had a chance to play it yet. I played a game of Zooloreto which is a pretty fun game, and then later on a game of Alhambra. I won both games, although I feel I got pretty lucky in Alhambra.

The games were over so we got back to our hotel room kind of uncertain about what to do the next day. Traditionally, many members of the department go to do the Maligne Canyon hike, but we were worried about the weather reports of cold blizzard conditions. We did, in the end, decide to join the hikers. It was a pretty good choice, I think. We got to go quite a bit further into the canyon than I got to previously, so that was worth it.

It was nearly 1:00 when we finished the hike and climbed into our cars to head home. On the way, a group of us stopped at a pretty nice little food place called L&W in Hinton for lunch. The roads were clear and nice for the early going, and we even saw the sun for some time. Then fog started to descend and the trip got a tad more frightening.

Fortunately, we made our careful way back home safely to put a cap on a pretty good trip to Jasper!

Morgan