First step
was to stuff up flight times and miss our flight to NZ but they sorted us out
after taxing us a bit and off we went on our first flight across the
world.
Got into Vancouver and had a hotel booked, the La Quinta in
Richmond, and promptly found ourselves in the middle of china town. Not a bad thing some would say, but this was
proper china town, large numbers of the people didn’t understand English at all
and we were both jet lagged to hell and fried from our 25-30hrs of travel, on
top of this the cars were on the wrong side of the road. After pottering around trying restaurant
after restaurant searching for an English takeaway menu we finally stumbled on a
Cactus Club, we walked through the doors and the bartender took one look at us,
sat us down at the bar and put a couple of drinks in front of us. When the drinks were almost done he came back
with some menus and started trying to communicate with us, we ended up getting a good feed and a few
drinks and learning some things we needed to know.
The next few days are a bit of a blur of jet lag, paper
work, shopping for warm clothes and getting a car. After very little deliberation the mighty
Ford Windstar was purchased.
Then it was out of Vancouver and off towards
Manning Park.
We discovered that driving on the wrong side of the road is
mainly an issue for the passenger and mainly when veering left. Hurtling towards the side of the road with
no control is very disconcerting when seated on the right hand side. As the sun went down it started snowing just
to add some tension to some already very relaxed aussies but we made it and
spent a lovely evening with Michelle and her dog just north of Hope before driving
out to Manning Park in the morning and our life for the next while.