A Wooden Leg, a Parasite, Silvertips

Short Version:
We eat delicious foods, grind up a mountain, and then leave.

Long Version:
Thanksgiving, be it Canadian or Amerikan, is essentially a harvest festival. Canadian Thanksgiving is a month earlier than its Amerikan counterpart. I assume this is because the cold comes earlier and with greater force here in the north*. We spent a lot of the weekend either shopping for, cooking, or eating delicious foods. In line with most of what we've heard about Vancouver - and especially North Vancouver - it rained most of the weekend, although we did get one day of glorious sunshine, on the Sunday, which one of spent running in the woods and swimming in the icy-cold pool, while the other more responsible one did a bunch of planning and preparation for the next leg of the trip, which should see us blasting around Utah and parts as-yet unknown. There were fifteen of us for Thanksgiving dinner, including one with a new take on a wooden leg and one who'd acquired some form of nasty parasite on a recent trip to Africa. The doctors in Uganda had given him some medication for it. One of the possible side-effects listed on the package was "trouble," but it was the Captain who provided the best examples of trouble on the night; carnaging several people with pumpkin cheesecake spillage and then setting fire to the decorative vines.

A day or two later we decided it really was high time we got high in Vancouver. So we found a spot for the Reaper near the top of Skyline Drive, and stopped in to see Monsieur Le Couteur, who was drying freshly-cut rocks in the sun atop the garbage cans. He'd spied a bear half an hour earlier, and was mildly concerned that it might take it into its head to rummage round in the garbage, thereby disturbing his carefully-ordered sample set. We ran away, westwards along the Powerlines trail, and snuck in to the Grouse Mountain wolf enclosure, where we saw no wolves, but some most excellent evidence of their presence: a child's shoe, lying forlornly in the no-man's-land inside the fence. No severed foot inside, and no bloodstains, but emotive nonetheless.

And then we found the start of the Grouse Grind trail, and went up. And up. And up. We were by far the fastest critters on the trail, and half an hour or so in we were getting ready to start in on the self-congratulatory stuff. Then we saw the sign. It said: "HALFWAY"

Oh.

Maybe we should slow down then.

The trail got steeper, which made slowing down easier, and then got steeper again. More and more of the trail was steps, none of which were regularly-sized or -spaced. Some of them were too high for Nene's little legs to manage easily, and she had to scramble. More and more of the people we encountered were sitting down, or leaning against trees. Many of them were sweaty.

Eventually we reached the top of Grouse Mountain and spent some time taking in the views out over Vancouver, with Georgia Strait and the Island to the west, and Amerika's Olympic Peninsula to the south. Then we walked back down, via the BCMC Trail, which we'd been told would drop us out at the top of Skyline, near the Reaper and the promise of a cold drink. Turns out, though, that the trail which connects near-direct to the top of Skyline is the OLD BCMC Trail. Not the one we took. The one we took dropped us back at the bottom of the Grind. So we then got to walk back up half a mountain to get to the trail that took us back down to where we wanted to be. Normal people probably would have wandered back along the flattish Powerlines instead. Actually, all evidence points to normal people not doing the Grouse Grind in the first place, with a second level of normalcy kicking in at the top, where 95% of climbers take the gondola back down. Scottish heritage says no to paying for unnecessaries, though, so we arrived back at the Le Couteurs' several hours after we'd left, thirsty and hungry and with really tired legs. Ginger beer and whole-wall maps and photgraphs were awesome, as was the electron microscope. The killer, though, was the enormous fossilised tooth, which is quite possibly the coolest item in the world.

Then we went home, had a hot tub, and watched some hockey** on the enormous television - first home game of the new season for the Vancouver team. We were keen to go along, but the cheapest seats cost $91 each, which kind of gives lie to their slogan: "We are all Canucks." We've decided to adopt a team from the third-tier competition instead, and have settled on the Everett Silvertips, because their mascot is cool***. So cool, in fact, that we decided to go there.







* = Apparently Vancouver is further north of the equator than Dunedin is south. This may or may not have some bearing on Dunedin being a shithole.

** = That's ice-hockey for those of you who believe that field hockey exists and/or is relevant and/or is watchable

*** = A silvertip is a grizzly bear.