I'm back from five days in Vancouver, BC. It was my twins's 35th Bday, one flew up from Columbus. We had visited in November and I thought it a nice place, it's nicer in July (duh). The news kept harping on how hot it was and they had "heat alerts", it broached 80°F a couple of days. And it was warm in the sun often as not.
We did a lot of stuff, walked a lot, very nice city, my daughter lives in Yaletown about 4 blocks from where she works. This basically is "downtown". The area is mostly high rise apartment/condo buildings, 30-50 stories high on a peninsula with mountains visible to the north across the bay. It is a large port city and has quite a bit of industry mostly separated from the residential areas. There are quite a few "unhoused" folks, I saw some groups using drugs on the streets, mostly over near Chinatown. I saw one tent encampment, nothing like the Tenderloin district in SF though, but worse than here by a good bit. I know it rates high on "lists" of places to live and of course it is pricey, not so much for US visitors though. Our hotel room was up there, over $400 a night (Hilton downtown). It was a lot less in November. We did get "free" bfast though ...
I'll post some photos later.
I think "WestJet" is the worst airline I've used in a LONG LONG time. Their web site is painfully slow and useless and checkin was appallingly bad. And we were in first coming back to ATL and there were no monitors anywhere, they did the safety brief by hand. There is a major problem in ATL we managed because my daughter got caught in it when she visited last month. You go through customs in Canada, but your luggage does not. So, we had a domestic gate in ATL, but our luggage was in INTL. You can take the train to INTL if you know about this, our stewardess told us to go to domestic luggage which was wrong. But you leave security so you have to take a bus back and the lines are very long for said bus. So, we couldn't take MARTA practicably and I just got a cab for $50. Traffic was predictably bad of course. I can't believe they don't inform folks where their luggage will be, or inform them incorrectly. Catching those buses back is a real pain. At least we got upgraded, the seats in the back are horrible, and no food on a 4.3 hour flight for them.
