Day 13
The Vancouver Glue Factory
This was an exciting day! I really hate that.
Before I get into the excitement, there will be a program note that this day officially marked the beginning of being on the wrong side of the halfway point of our vacation, meaning that I spent a substantial amount of time from here on out dreading the end of the vacation, and having to return to a dead end job and a ton of bills.
The day started out slowly enough. Since we'd lost the umbrella the day before, at the same time we promised to spend an extra $5 per day on a working air conditioner (yes, I'm still pissed about that), it had to be cold and rainy outside. Stands to reason that it would, since that's the sort of weather that you expect from the area.
Still, we were paying that extra working air conditioner fee, so in effort to get our money's worth, we put on our heavy down parkas and with grim looks of satisfaction on our faces, drove all over the cold rain slicked streets of Vancouver, with the air conditioner blasting on its maximum setting.
We had actual errands to run, too. The first was to get a new umbrella. The others were to get some hosiery and a few more of those little airline sized bottles of hooch for the return train trip.
I guess I didn't mention that, but the Vancouver (well, BC provincial) liquor stores had about the best selection of airline sized bottles of booze that I've ever seen anywhere. We'd already stocked up on a load of them the day before, and this seemed like a good time to get even more. We did find most of what we were looking for, including one miniature bottle of authentic Newfoundland Screech (bottled in Jamaica). Too bad these things don't come with an official Newfie to "Screech" us in.
That was still mostly the boring part. The interesting, but good part that followed was the Vietnamese food we got at one of the Mall food courts, which was pretty good. Well, actually, other than the food, the rest of the mall was pretty boring. I looked for a couple more Len Deighton books, but couldn't find any, because the book stores were so poorly stocked. We did kick around the idea of buying a few of those disposable 35mm cameras, and using them to photograph all of the pages out of the book "50 Ways to Make a Greener Earth," but we just never got around to it.
We were planning on continuing the boredom by catching a movie later in the day, but with nothing to do right at the moment, and with no theaters showing anything until evening, we just headed back to the motel.
Here's where it got interesting: We were within about two blocks of the motel, just turning left onto the road that the place lives on, and nearly got cut off by a Gray Line bus driver, making the same left turn from the next lane over, but cutting our lane just a bit. Not one of those full sized busses that had an excuse, either, but one of those little things like the smaller rental car companies use at the airports.
I just had enough time to shout a few expletives and slam on the brakes, and sit there for a while, wondering where the other guy's head was, or how much he almost cost us (since we waived the "CDW" on the rental contract). Our car didn't screech its tires or anything, but I guess we still had that bus driver's attention, because he obviously wasn't looking in front of him when he ran over that pedestrian.
OK, he didn't quite run over her. By the time he stopped completely, she was had just turned into breathing wheel chocks. This was probably because she got a sort of reprieve when he knocked her about 5 feet before she finally fell to the ground completely, and even then, the momentum made her roll a few more feet.
It was a truly sickening sight. I was sure that she was done for, and very surprised when, with the help of two or three others, she was able to get back on her feet and wobble off to the side of the road. I felt sort of dumb, sitting there, not quite in a parking spot, blocking all sorts of traffic, as she was being led out of sight.
At first, I thought the building that she was led into was a hospital, or at least some sort of clinic, but only later learned that it was really a building full of law offices. I guess Canadians have the same set of priorities as their brethren to the south.
Doing the best we could figure, we took the car back to the motel parking lot, so it at least wasn't blocking the traffic, and walked the two blocks back to the accident scene, where the police had arrived, so we could give them our statements. There were quite a few people there giving their statements already, and for the most part, all the stories seemed to match, except for the one given by the driver, who claimed it was the pedestrian's fault for having crossed against a red "don't walk" light. Most of the other witnesses were in a bug hurry, and cleared out rather quickly before they had a chance to be saddled with a bunch of paperwork. We were obviously too honest or too stupid, or both, to follow their lead, so we got to sit in the back seat of a cop car for a half an hour, filling out accident reports in longhand.
There I go, cramping up my scotch bottle hand again.
Sometime toward the end of that half hour, the cop returned to the car to get our verbal statements. You know, cops everywhere have this way of looking at you to make you feel as if you've done something wrong, even when you're just there as a witness to someone else's screw-up. The cop was very polite, and only asked a couple of questions related to when we were planning to leave town, and mumbled something about probably not issuing any citations against us.
This put me in a rather distraught mood. I guess this is just normal paranoia for having recently dealt with a cop. On the one hand, I was still a bit upset at the bus driver for having nearly hit us, finishing the job on someone with lesser amounts of protective metalwork. I had the feeling that he was clearly out of control throughout that whole intersection. On the other hand, after I had several reassurances that the woman had only been superficially harmed, I felt sort of bad for having finked on the guy for screwing up.
With all this running through my head, I just wanted to return to the motel for a little lie down. We got back to the hotel OK, but just as I was thinking of settling in for a nap, the maid showed up to redo our room.
Normally, I wouldn't mind at all to wait around in the room, or maybe in the hall, while she did her thing, but she was looking very timid, and acting like it would be impossible to make up our room with us in the same city. So, I tried to explain to her that we'd be out of the room in another five or ten minutes, and she returned me a sort of stare that said I could say that in any non-dead human language, and she still wasn't going to understand me.
Aw, hell. I made a couple of quick phone calls back to NH, and Robert tried to come up with some holiday sight seeing adventure on short notice. He decided that we should drive up to the north end of town and take the ferry to Nanaimo and see where all those dessert bars come from. I asked him if it was going to be very expensive to take the ferry, but he said it wouldn't be.
It turned out to cost $27.50 each way, which made the round trip cost about twice as much as dinner did, which was about all we did while on the island. It was raining and foggy, so there wasn't really much to look at or do other than take pictures of a lot of gray, wet air.
Still, we had a rather nice dinner at some Mexican place in Nanaimo, and afterward, Robert stopped by a shopping mall on the island and got himself a Nanaimo bar for dessert. It just seemed like something that had to be done once we were there.
And, the trip out and back was sort of nice. It was so foggy that all we could see were flashes of light from the light houses, or maybe the other boats. One and a half hours each way on a ferry that said it could hold 362 cars, and looked like it did. I had a very nice nap both ways, and during the car trips to and from the ferry station, we read to each other from Vacations in Hell, just to reassure ourselves that things really could be worse.
On to Day 14. Glitz and Doom
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