The Transportation Adventures of Therese

It is a well known fact that Translink hates Sarah. Recent developments, however, suggest that Therese may be the antithesis of Sarah in Translink-related matters. The entire time that Therese was here, we never missed a bus and we never had to wait more than 2 minutes for one to show up... every connection showed up at the perfect time - we never had to run for the bus, but we never had to wait long either. So apparently Translink loves Therese. Unfortunately, Vancouver night clubs were not so accomodating.

OK, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Therese arrived, with an extremely large suitcase in tow, on Monday afternoon. We just chillaxed* for the afternoon, going to Sodas for dinner and to the Dunbar to watch Talledaga Nights. Word to the wise: as with many comedies, most of the funny stuff is in the trailer.

The next day we decided to do the Grouse Grind! It took 2 buses and a Seabus trip to get there, but thanks to Therese's magic Translink powers, we got there in record time!





















Apparently I had been spotted on my previous trip to the Grouse Grind, as the sign that used to warn merely of black bear sightings had another wild animal listed on it this time.

On the way up we ran into some interesting characters, including a guy from Hamilton (who joined us in our "We love Mac!" rants, as he went there too) and two randoms who were speaking what I think may have been Spanish and who liked to pass you and then walk really, really slowly in front of you. And spit a lot. Freaks.

I'd like to post all the photos of our trip up, but I'm pretty sure that it would crash Blogger. Therese loves to take photos and I am a photo-taking enabler. I blame our many photo ops along the way for our taking longer than the average to get up the mountain. That and Therese's low blood sugar. Also, the other people in our way. It has nothing whatsoever to do with our lack of physical prowess.

Anyway, here are just a few of the particularly good photos from the climb:














Check me out... I'm chillaxing at the 3/4 way mark... oh ya, this is soooo easy!









Here we are at the top, savouring our victory over nature!

































And here we are devouring a well-earned Beaver Tail.


I'd also like to take a moment to point out my T-shirt in this photo. My sister gave me this shirt** and I vowed to have a pic of me wearing it on my blog.... like, blog self-reflexivity in T-shirt form. Meta-blog if you will. I got a few comments on this shirt that day, and a few laughs***.














The other important thing about our trip was that Therese taught me the very important skill of surreptitiously taking photos of cute boys while pretending to take photos of ourselves.




Exhibit A: No-shirt boy, who reached the top with his two friends shortly after we did. They decided to go up on the balcony to take in the view. Therese decided to pretend to take my photo while actually directing the camera a bit higher. And then you zoom in on the photo thusly:
















Exhibit B: We saw this boy unloading kegs of beer for the restuarant off of one of the gondolas. And then he**** turned out to be on our gondola on the way down. Hence this photo:



After the Grind, we headed to the Templeton to satisify our jones for some poutine (even though Therese had never eaten poutine before in her life. Sacre bleu!), and then headed home for quick showers before heading out for the evening. We went for dinner with Kalev and his friend Alex, who was visiting from San Diego, to the Rugby Club where, despite having just told Therese that I *never* run into people I know around Vancouver, I ran into someone that I know. After dinner we headed to Celebrities where, despite it being just past 10 pm there was the longest lineup that I've ever seen at a club in my life! On a Tuesday! So we decided to head to Jupiter for a few drinks instead. Unfortunately Jupiter, which is usually quite classy, decided that it was a good idea to have the worst karaoke that I have EVER heard. So it was a quick drink there and then we decided that, since we value our sanity, we had to leave. We checked out the Oasis, but it was closing at midnight, being that it was Tuesday. The lineup at Celebrities had barely moved, so we decided to check out the Odyssey instead. And the Odyssey was having a drag queen comedy show, Tickle Me Tuesdays. Apparently it was just not our night for good entertainment.

And that was pretty much all of Therese's trip! She had to catch a flight back to the T dot the next day! (Her trip was waaaay too short!). I miss you, EZ-T!!


*this is my new word for the week. Therese often uses this word and I appear to have incorporated it into my vocabulary.

**thank you thinkgeek.com

***at least, I hope they were laughing at my shirt.

***damn, I hope none of these people find my blog.