Packed and labelled

The office contents are all packed up. The company moves people so much that they've gone to reusable plastic boxes. All my stuff fits into two boxes. That excludes computers and furniture, of course.

Dreams

This is part of the Dilbert strip from Aug 23, 2007.

It's particularly appropos since Friday I'll be packing up my office for move into a fabric covered box. Apparently having over a decade with the company meant that I was at the top of the list for a primo fabric covered box. One side of my box will be glass. I'll have a third floor window cube with a panoramic view of the parking garage and the fitness center I never have time to use.

Oh, well. As things are shaping up for the next couple of months, I won't be spending much time in the box. Trips scheduled for the week after Labor day and almost all of October. More details to come. It seems to change daily.

Aug 8 and 9, Vancouver and Whistler

Not going to belabor the rest of the trip. It was a good time but nothing as fun as the whale watching.

On the 8th, we did a bus tour of the city of Vancouver. Something to help us get our bearings in the place. More for a future trip than this one as we pretty well booked up the time we had this trip. The bus tour got us into the Harbour Place tower which has a circular observation deck with great views including this one of Canada place with a cruise ship docked.
It took us thru the major districts of the city, Gastown, Chinatown, etc. And out around Stanley park for a good look at the Lion's Gate bridge (which was, obviously, designed by the same guy who did the larger Golden Gate). The last stop on the bus tour was the Granville Island Public Market
. Looked like a great place to shop for produce, art, and wine.

On the 9th, we had booked a trip up the Sea to Sky route to Whistler/Blackcombe. We took the
Whistler Mountaineer train up and bus back. That gave us about four hours in Whistler. Which turned out to be about three hours too many. The train trip up was great, took tons of pictures as the train wound up Howe Sound and then up into the mountains. In Whistler we wandered thru one art gallery where nothing was under several thousand dollars and a few souvenir shops. There were opportunities to go zip-lining or ride a ski lift gondola to the top of the mountain. Alice doesn't do heights well so those were pretty well out. So we had lunch at an Irish pub and bought a shirt and an Inukchuk (an Indian symbol of welcome that's being used as the mascot/symbol of the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held at Vancouver and Whistler).

After the bus ride back down to our hotel in Vancouver we cleaned up a bit and went out for some shopping on Robson Street and dinner at the Imperial Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant used to have a real nice view over the harbor but it's now blocked by construction.

Aug 7, Victoria to Vancouver

Nothing very exciting this day but a day of contrasts.

We headed into Victoria with the intention of spending some time in the government / museum area. It was the first work day back from "BC Days" holiday for the city. Possibly because of that there was no parking to be found for blocks around the area. Neither one of us felt like walking much so we headed the rent car up towards the ferry to Tsawwassen. Long wait for the ferry there and lots of traffic from Tsawwassen up into Vancouver but all incident-free.

One afternoon at the B&B, we had chatted with a couple on vacation from Hawaii. Who knew the people who live in Hawaii needed to take vacations! They had just come from a few days in Vancouver and had turned up a magic code that got us rooms at the Hyatt downtown for less than half the rack rate.

The room was very nice and about as much of a contrast from the B&B as you can imagine. From 19th century antiques at the B&B to 21st century modern in the Hyatt.

We had been eating these multi-course. expensive, late meals up to this point and both needed something a little more basic. We had fish and chips and a beer in a food concourse across from Canada Place. Back at the hotel we had the concierge set us up for a bus tour of the city and a trip up to Whistler mountain. More on that later.

Aug 6, Victoria BC

Still blogging the past. We had no internet access at the B&B other than a laptop in the parlor.

We ran across this little fellow on the grounds of the Government House gardens, just a couple of blocks from the B&B. We slept in, had a late breakfast at the B&B, then strolled over to these gardens.

From there it was off to do some whale watching. We picked the Orca Spirit folks out of the recommendations at Prior House. We rode out on the top deck of the "closed boat" (i.e., not a Zodiac raft). The boat went out from the Inner Harbour area of Victoria. While waiting to board we had a walk along the seawall and watched the float planes come and go.

We saw a humpback diving. Didn't manage to get any decent pics of it. Then a "transient orca" followed by one of the three pods of resident orcas. None of them were breaching but one did seem to have the "Shamu roll on your side and wave" move going on. I was using the Panasonic digital cam with 12x optical zoom set in burst mode to try to get some shots of the beasts. Had to balance zoom level with my ability to locate the whales while on a rocking boat. So my best pic, in this post, isn't anything to write home about.

I can probably crop it down a bit. Or just swipe some images from the Orca Spirit site and claim them as my own. :)

Whale watching tour was a good three hours. After that we went back for tea (and a bunch of sweets) at the B&B.

Finished up the night with a late dinner at the Blue Crab. I tried out some overly sweet special martini... won't do that again. Martini good, martini with blue curacao and some other sweet liquer bad. We had a nice half-liter of Grey Monk Pinot Gris with the meal and I had a killer chocolate dessert.

Aug 5, Victoria BC

Butchart Gardens

On Sunday we drove up to the Butchart Gardens. Massive gardens, 150 acres of converted limestone quarry and surrounding land. Not so much my thing but still pretty amazing amount of flowers.

Later that afternoon we toured thru Craigdaroch "Castle", a mansion built by a 19th century robber baron.

For dinner we drove to Sooke to the Sooke Harbour House on Whiffen Spit Road (love the name). Travel and Leisure rated the Sooke Harbour House #2 on their 100 best hotels in the U.S. and Canada last year. We got the single best table in the restaurant! There are two rooms, a larger and smaller one. We were in the smaller room, total of maybe 5 tables. Our table was in the corner with two sides facing out to the inlet and our backs to the room. It was like being in a little private dining room. The service was impeccable and the food was incredible!

Anacortes Washington ferry line

Flew into Seattle this morning on our way to Victoria, British Columbia.

At the moment we're waiting to roll the car onto the ferry from Anacortes, WA to Sydney, BC.

Update:This day, Saturday Aug 4, was an all travel day. We took off from IAH at 7:30am CDT, arrived at Sea-Tac about 10am PDT. That gave us four hours to get the baggage, get the rent car, drive about 100 miles up to Anacortes and make the 2pm ferry. *#@% traffic on I-5 meant that it was barely adequate. If the ferry had been backed up much more we'd have missed it and there's only the one sailing per day to Victoria. The ferry left about 30 minutes late and the crossing to Sydney on Vancouver Island, with two short stops in the small islands, took 3-1/2 hours. Final leg was about a 20-minute drive down into Victoria to the Prior House Inn B&B where we stayed. Beautiful place!

Dinner at Cafe Brio. Had a really excellent local wine that had only 160 cases produced. Can't recall the exact wine, I really need to get in the habit of writing notes, but it was from Black Widow Winery.

Getting cubed

The word just came down that we're moving out of our nice private offices into cubicles. I haven't been in a cube in twenty years. I foresee working from home a lot more!