Holiday, celebrate

April 30th 2011: Day 1
Pack, unpack, repack, dither, worry. What are we going to need? What needs to go in which bag? Checked in online (a good innovation since we last flew), said goodbye to Boy and Piggy and drove to the hotel near Heathrow to avoid a mad rush down the motorway in the morning. Set the new travel alarm for a suitable hour and went to sleep, to be woken suddenly quite soon after by a loud bleeping. After beating the alarm clock hard and failing to stop the noise we realised the noise was actually the hotel fire alarm. We fell out of bed in a daze, threw on some clothes and emerged onto the landing along with the occupants of neighbouring rooms. At this point the alarm stopped, so we had a brief discussion ("Can you smell smoke? I can't smell smoke.") and all turned round and went back to bed.

May 1st: Day 2
Found a polite letter pushed under our door thanking us for our co-operation during the evacuation of the hotel last night. Oops.

Caught the shuttle bus to the airport. What a confusing place that is. The signage is pretty unhelpful, sending you up 4 floors, then down 3, then up then down again until you've completely lost your bearings. There seems to be so much 'Hurry up and wait'; queuing up for one procedure then walking substantial distances just to join another queue. We had to remove our boots to go through security, then had to sit and wait again, only to be herded like sheep (quietly bleating "baa, baa" as if at Cropredy) through the next section, with the voice over the airport tannoy reminiscent of Logan's Run.

The inflight movie system has improved since I last did a long-haul flight (in 1976!). Back then there were large screens at the front of each section of the aircraft with the sound coming through individual headphones. If you were unlucky (as I was) your seat position sometimes meant that you couldn't comfortably watch the screen in your section and had to watch the one in front - which wasn't quite in sync with your screen, making watching the film more of a trial than a pleasure. Now everyone has individual screens in the back of the seat in front with a wide choice of viewing options. I watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (very enjoyable) and The King's Speech (very well acted) as well as an episode of Upstairs Downstairs and listened to a Moody Blues album whilst dozing. (It was a long flight!) The view from the window was amazing; we had clear skies almost all the way - I wondered what on earth I could see below us, then realised it was the shadow of the plane and the vapour trail on the sea


and what we thought was the tops of clouds turned out to be the snow in Greenland.


Vancouver airport is very civilised and well organised, with helpful staff at the information desk who could tell us where to catch the train and bus we needed to reach our hotel. The girl would have been right except for the fact that there had been a marathon through the city that morning and the buses had been re-routed. We learned this from a very considerate political canvasser who took pity on us after we'd been standing at the bus stop for 15 minutes. So we decided to stretch our legs properly after sitting for so long and walked to the hotel; luckily it wasn't too far and all in a straight line so we couldn't get lost, and even in that short distance we passed five Starbucks in case we were in need of an emergency coffee.

After checking into the hotel we took another little stroll along English Bay, enjoying the sunshine

despite it being late at night as far as we were concerned. It's a very pretty area, and we were fascinated by the lengths people go to with their roof gardens:


I wonder how they've ensured its stability during high winds.