lensman

Well we're back now....

B and I took some time to head out for a far too short vacation.

It started off pretty well getting lots of home chores done, and then....

Just a few days before we were going to catch a flight to the west coast, while driving on the highway my

escapehybrid overheated, and had a system shutdown.... YES, MY CAR REBOOTED!!! NO, It doesn't run windows... I took it into the dealer, and they could see the system log showing the fault, but they couldn't get the part to fail, and escalated it... Heh I think this computer needs to be hacked into once the warrenty's done. :-) But anyway the part was replaced (turned out to be a bad cooling pump) and it's covered under warrenty.

So with the car at the dealers we were off on our adventure.

We flew out to Seattle, and crashed for the night, and caught the Victoria Clipper out to Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. We stayed at a wonderfull 5 acre resort called the English Inn & Resort, which was once someones home that was done up in the style of an Shakspearian village. One building had a real thatched roof. (I have a TON of pictures I'll post links after I get them sorted and uploaded.) Lovely gardens, But expensive the total for our two night stay including meals was more than $900 CAN ($841 US)

After exploring Victoria, B and I got a Sea Plane ride over to the city of Vancouver BC. The Travel agent lost the bonus B was going to send her for the Hotel we got stuck with. The Place was in an central city location, but in what seemed like a not great neighborhood, and the room was a "suite" with a small kitchenet, the TINIEST bedroom possible to fit a queen sized bed in, and it stank of old spagetti.... They moved us to a "slightly" better suite (This one didn't stink) but had NO air circulation in the bed room (The manager had to come and see that for himself, he didn't know about it beforehand, Although he did get us an old fan.)

We moved the next day to the more regular hotel in their chain for the remainder of our stay. (I'll give them this the staff at both places were EXCEEDINGLY polite and honestly tried to make things right... But even at the second hotel there we ended up going through three rooms to get something acceptable. (First they stuck us in a smoking room by mistake, the next room the two SETS of keys they gave us just wouldn't work at all... )

We caught one of the tour busses and tooled around seeing the city (We should go back and see more in deatil) and went around Stanly Park, B was absolutely in love with all the old growth trees there, they actually had her in tears of joy. We also saw the Aquarium there (Which was really nicely laid out).

Lastly we caught the "Cascades" Amtrack back down the coast (Unfortunately that was one of the two overcast days we had out there, so the view from the train wasn't what we had hoped for.

When we got back to Seattle, we had a "family obligation" to spend time with some of B's relatives (Some were really nice... One is a maniplulative old crone.) I even met

labyrinthos's sister... (You can easily see the family resembelence :-) ) It's too bad you couldn't be there for the barbeque....

B and I were able to pry ourselves away from the family thing long enough to run in and see The Sci Fi Museum and Hall of Fame, and the Experiece Music Project.... Seeing another Frank Gehry building... At least this time I liked some of the colors the material's he used brought out (although the baby blue in the middle?!?!?!?! I just seemed so wrong, and the whole unfinished inside... )

Now It's time to go fall down, and try to get back on boston time....