My trip to Vancouver (incl. VanCon) was spent with the delightful Sarah-Louise, aka timecake! Having planned this excursion about a year in advance you can imagine just how giddy with excitement and disbelief we were that OMG IT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING XD! Our main intent in travelling all the way to Vancouver was, of course, to attend the Supernatural convention "VanCon", but in order to get the most out of our trip (and the ridiculous amounts of money we were spending to go on said trip!) we decided to stay in Vancouver for about a week. This post will blather on a bit about what we got up to for the first half of the week in Vancouver, I'll make another one solely to gush talk about the convention itself which took place over our last four days.

Though we were due to fly out on Monday 23rd of August, our holiday started pretty much from the Saturday where both crewed at Collectormania: Glasgow (a sorry excuse for a convention, but a great crewing experience), so we managed to get quite a bit of squee-ing done as we psyched ourselves up for our impending trip!

On the Friday morning however I'd managed to jam the fingers of my right hand in the fire door at work, the nail on my middle finger instantly turned blue whilst my finger swelled horribly. Come the Saturday night I was on my way to A&E after hearing everyone telling me my finger might explode on the plane due to the pressure/fluid build up- not something I actually believed but I thought I'd better be safe than sorry because I seriously wasn't going to let anything stop me getting on that flight come Monday morning! An x-ray later and I was told that I'd managed to fracture my finger, thankfully I was assured that no finger-sploding would occur and that the swelling would go down itself in a couple of weeks and that the nail (a delightful shade of blue) would probably fall off in it's own time (two months later and it's only just done this btw. It's ridiculously gross right now).

Sarah-Lou stayed at my house on the Sunday night and come Monday morning we were off! Things started off pretty well, we got to the airport on time, got checked in okay, boarded the plane on time and after a half hour/hour delay flew from Glasgow to Heathrow where we were then due to transfer to terminal 5 to catch our flight from Heathrow to Vancouver. So of course we reach Heathrow airport where we were delayed some more because they couldn't find those things they put behind the wheels to stop the plane from rolling backwards? I think we were another half hour late getting off. Then our bags were delayed by another half hour and by this point we're beginning to worry because we still need to get to T5 and check in and stuff and we're approaching our deadline of "2hrs before the flight leaves".

So I check with security and we're told if our bags don't arrive in another 15minutes we'd better hightail it to our next flight and we'd have to sort out getting our luggage sent on once we reached Vancouver O_o not something either of us were thrilled about! Our bags arrived around 10minutes later however and then we were running like actual crazy people to catch the train to T5 and to get checked in and through security and we literally arrived at the boarding gate as they were letting the last group of people through. We were absolutely knackered! OMG. I don't even know what we'd have done if we'd missed it :S

Thankfully that never happened and we were soon on our way to Vancouver, our spirits once again high!

Our first day in Vancouver was spent getting checked into our hotel (we stayed at the Sheraton), and exploring the general area (mostly in search of food ;D). Sarah-Lou and I were aiming to stay awake until around 9pm to get our bodies used to the time difference but come 7am we could barely see straight so just ended up going to bed! Thankfully other than this first early night we weren't affected by any kind of jetleg, which was pretty awesome. (Not so awesome was the jetlag suffered after arriving back home a week later, but more on that later!)

Having planned the trip to Vancouver for the past year, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see whilst we were over there. Thankfully Sarah-Lou was very accommodating and/or wanted to see the same things as I did :D

We were up pretty early come Tuesday morning with a vague plan for our day: the Library that looks like the Colosseum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and The UBC Museum of Anthropology!

We thought we'd end up walking for miles but, as I'd discovered when I went to Rome back in April, things are actually alot closer than they appear to be on the map! We also discovered that nothing in Vancouver opened until 10am :S so we were wandering around for a good hour waiting on places opening up. Incidentally, we managed to find both the Art Gallery and the Library with almost ridiculous ease. We decided not to go into the Art Gallery proper due to the cost, and although we planned to go back one night when they were supposed to be doing their "enter for a donation only" we missed the day it was on and never ended up going it. We did explore the gallery shop which was pretty awesome though. I'm not a huge fan of art galleries but I did like some of the First Nations artwork postcards they were selling, particularly as it related to what we were going to see at the Museum of Anthropology later on that day!

As for the Vancouver Public Library, heretofore referred to as "The Colosseum II" ;D getting to see it for real it was pretty damn exciting. For me at least! I swear, if my local library looked as awesome (or was nearly as huge) as The Colosseum II was, I'd never leave it. You'll all be pleased to note, however, that I did not hug this building. heh.



After our morning explorations we jumped on a bus and headed for the University of British Columbia and the Museum of Anthropology:


I particularly fell in love with Haida artist Bill Reid's work, his most famous example being "The Raven and the First Men" as seen below. It depicts the figure of Raven (a wise and powerful, yet mischievious trickster) discovering the first Haida humans and coaxing them out into the world from a giant clamshell. The sculpture itself is simple gorgeous, particularly when seen up close and personal. I was kind of gutted that they didn't have any mini replica's for sale, but did come away with a wee postcard and a shitload of photographs ;D