Long Beach vacation day 1
Saturday October 10, 2009:
Today is the first day of my much-anticipated trip to Long Beach. Though actually I’m first going to Victoria to chill with some homies and do some commerce and rubbernecking I didn’t get to last time.
I had originally planned to hit the awesome Ooh La La confectionary for some treats to take to the beach with me, and then maybe also visit Miniature World, Russell Books and one of the naval museums in Victoria.
Alas, twas not to be. Yesterday one of the larger ferries doing the Vancouver->Victoria run suffered a fire in a backup generator and was taken out of service for repairs. That plus this being a long weekend resulted in this:
Thankfully Mike gave me a heads-up that it might be busy, so I skipped breakfast and went right to the ferry terminal in the morning. I arrived at Tsawassen at about 9:20am and was told that I might get on the noon boat, but more likely would be on the 1pm boat. So I settled in for a four-hour wait; walked around a bit, had a snack and did some reading.
Noon came and went with no movement in my lane. The 1pm boat caused some movement but I didn’t get on. That was a bit of a miff, because the missing boat left a gap in the schedule and the next one wouldn’t be until 3pm. Tired of reading, I broke out the laptop and was going to blog furiously, but I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the local WAP after connecting. So I just did some hacking on one of my projects instead. Books and laptops are a great boon to the bored.
Finally got on the 3pm boat. Arrived in Victoria around 5:30pm, which was too late to do any of the things I wanted to do; everything closes at an unreasonable time here.
Went to Mike & Kate’s pad and had delicious homemade chicken korma. Caught up with same, met and adored the family pets, and called it a night.
(nb: I wasn’t able to get the wireless working at Mike’s place either, which is why I’m a few days behind in blogging this trip.)
Today’s GPS track:
[gmap type=”satellite” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” file=’__UPLOAD__/2009/10/20091010.kmz’]
