In other, no doubt completely unrelated news, we have a new PI in the building! Dr... Wonka, I think it was. Model organisms guy, working on a species closely related to C. elegans - V. kniddus.
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Elevated anxiety
Spotted on the top floor of my building yesterday:
In other, no doubt completely unrelated news, we have a new PI in the building! Dr... Wonka, I think it was. Model organisms guy, working on a species closely related to C. elegans - V. kniddus.
In other, no doubt completely unrelated news, we have a new PI in the building! Dr... Wonka, I think it was. Model organisms guy, working on a species closely related to C. elegans - V. kniddus.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
What I Did On My Staycation - Part II
Wednesday
The heavy rain that greeted me first thing in the morning made me exceedingly glad that I'd braved the windstorm to visit Stanley Park while the sun was still out the day before. However, an hour or two later the bus driver greeted me with a cheery "did you bring the sunshine with you?", and by the time we reached my stop (in the scary heart of the Downtown Eastside) the glare of bright winter sun off the wet streets was almost blinding.
My destination was the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, a delightful oasis in the middle of downtown, which I'd never visited before.
I took KJHaxton's advice and arrived just in time for the guided tour. There were only four of us there - me, a woman from New Zealand, and a couple from Italy. The Italians seemed to have difficulty understanding our guide's accent, and soon started talking quietly to each other in Italian, which was a bit annoying, even though the first part of the tour wasn't exactly stellar. Our guide carried a folder containing various printouts (some from Wikipedia) in plastic protector pockets, and rifled through it at an alarming rate, showing us each picture as he got to the corresponding part of the talk. He spent more time telling us about the high speed train network in China, and how we should visit China just to take the train, than about the garden itself - and I started to wonder if he was on commission.
However, things quickly improved as we finally moved out of the entrance hallway and into the garden itself. It really is lovely, and it was great to hear about the reasons for each design feature (it's all about contrasts).
Another day, another attraction I'd never visited before - hell, let's make it two attractions I'd never visited before!
This time, cycling was the wrong decision - the heavens opened about five minutes after I left home, and I was drenched and freezing before I'd even made it onto the sea wall. I turned left this time, rather than right, and pedalled as fast as my frozen, wet legs would take me along the southern edge of False Creek. The foul weather was mitigated somewhat by the opportunity to be the only person on the stretch of path that goes through the shiny new Olympic village development (it was too cold to stop and take photos, sorry), but only a little bit.
I paused to cast a lingering, longing look at the lovely warm Granville Island public market, but kept going, and was soon locking up my bike outside the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
This wasn't part of my original staycation plan, but I'd spotted a Groupon a couple of weeks earlier, and thought why not? I love boats, having been brought up watching old naval battle movies with my Mum, and the museum has a great one as its centrepiece. The St. Roch was an RCMP supply ship that was the first to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (second overall), and the first to completely circumnavigate North America (see, I was paying attention!) I love stories of polar exploration just as much as I love boats, so I greatly enjoyed the video about the boat's voyages and especially the chance to get on board, poking around the crew quarters and climbing ladders all over the place.
The boat exhibit was very well done, but I have to admit that the other display cases didn't do much for me at all - lots of models of old steam ships, that kind of thing. The museum was definitely worth visiting at the reduced Groupon rate, but I'm not sure I'd have felt the same way if I'd paid full price!
I thought again about heading straight for the cozy warmth of Granville Island, but decided to persevere with my cultural education and head to the adjacent Museum of Vancouver instead. Mr E Man and at least one other long-time Vancouver resident claimed to have never heard of the place, but I can confirm that it does indeed exist (tucked away in Vanier Park, in the same building as the Space Centre / Planetarium), and has a rather fetching crab sculpture outside:
I was really, really cold at this point, and didn't want to stay too long, but I really liked the museum. The rotating exhibit was on local food production (backyard veggie gardens, beehives and chicken coops), which was quite interesting, but I liked the permanent exhibits much better. They had photos from when the site of the Marine Building downtown was literally an old growth forest, and then more photos, videos, and artifacts from that period right up to the 1970s, which was exceedingly cool (there aren't many cities with a full photographic record of their development from trees to skyscrapers!) I particularly enjoyed the wobbly film taken from the back of one of the old street cars - oh how I wish we still had them!
The exhibits were pretty comprehensive, and didn't gloss over the terrible treatment of the city's First Nations, Chinese, and Japanese inhabitants over the years (there's more comprehensive coverage of the city's original First Nations inhabitants at the excellent Museum of Anthropology, which I'd been to several times before and so didn't visit on my staycation). Overall I thought it was very well done, and good value for money. I'll be back, some day when I'm not quite so cold and wet!
Onwards (in the still-pouring rain) to Granville Island, where I treated myself to fish and chips and a hot cup of tea and felt sooooo much better. I picked up more dinner ingredients before hauling my poor self through the pelting rain and up the steep hills to home, which is where theheart bathtub is.
For dinner, I roasted a Cornish game hen with fingerling potatoes, some adorable mini squash, and the rest of the asparagus and red pepper. We had some lovely olive bread with it, and some yumtastic chocolate brownies afterwards, as we watched the snow start to fall.
If I could shop at Granville Island every day, I'd cook more often, eat more healthily, and be completely broke.
Friday
I decided I'd had enough culture for one week, and went shopping instead. I trawled all my favourite vintage stores on Main Street, and although I didn't find the perfect burgundy leather jacket that I've had in my mind's eye for a couple of years now, I did manage to find a funky sweater and two very nice, very gently used winter coats (one grey, one tweedy one that I can actually wear with brown pants without looking like an eejit) for a combined total of $82. I suspect the grey one might actually be a guy's jacket, despite being bought from a women's clothing store (the shoulders are ever so slightly boxier, and the arms are ever so slightly longer, than usual, and the buttons are on the wrong side), but hey, it looks good on me IMNSHO and it cost $35, so who cares.
I met up with Mr E Man halfway through the day for a tasty lunch at one of our favourite restaurants, The Reef, and then again in the late afternoon for tea and cake at The Grind. I love this place - the front part is just your average coffee shop, but the back room is a cozy haven full of mismatched schoolroom-type furniture and is a great place to hang out and read or write. Before Mr E Man arrived I wrote a proper letter to my sister (who STILL doesn't have internet at her apartment in London, where she's been for over a year now. I am Not Impressed), but didn't manage any other writing.
In fact, not doing much writing was an ongoing theme of my staycation, and the only disappointment (I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of it and have considered starting to play the lottery so I can bum around parks and museums and coffee shops and watch early east coast hockey games all the time). This was mostly because of Mr E Man unexpectedly being off work - I left home later each day, and came home earlier, than I would have if he was working his usual 11-12 hour days, leaving less time for writing between my visits to all the galleries, parks, and museums. I really enjoyed what little writing I did do, and I'd like to build more writing time into my regular schedule. If I'm home with Mr E Man I tend to get distracted by conversations, TV, the internet, and our traditional long Scrabble and card games, so I think I need to set aside some designated time each weekend (or maybe on the occasional work day lunchtime) to leave the house and go and write somewhere else. I think I made enough of a start on a couple of projects to get me over that initial hump and keep me working on them... time will tell!
Overall, I highly recommend a staycation. Especially if it's in Vancouver, which (as I said in my last post) I have fallen in love with all over again. It was so relaxing, and so much cheaper (and more eco-friendly - I went everywhere by bike or public transit) than any other vacation I've ever taken! I wanted a second week, to do more writing and exercise than I managed to fit into my busy sight-seeing schedule, but it was not to be, and it's back to waking up in the dark and braving the snow and ice on my way in to work.
I do enjoy my job (mostly), but, well, it aint no staycation.
The heavy rain that greeted me first thing in the morning made me exceedingly glad that I'd braved the windstorm to visit Stanley Park while the sun was still out the day before. However, an hour or two later the bus driver greeted me with a cheery "did you bring the sunshine with you?", and by the time we reached my stop (in the scary heart of the Downtown Eastside) the glare of bright winter sun off the wet streets was almost blinding.
My destination was the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, a delightful oasis in the middle of downtown, which I'd never visited before.
East meets West
I took KJHaxton's advice and arrived just in time for the guided tour. There were only four of us there - me, a woman from New Zealand, and a couple from Italy. The Italians seemed to have difficulty understanding our guide's accent, and soon started talking quietly to each other in Italian, which was a bit annoying, even though the first part of the tour wasn't exactly stellar. Our guide carried a folder containing various printouts (some from Wikipedia) in plastic protector pockets, and rifled through it at an alarming rate, showing us each picture as he got to the corresponding part of the talk. He spent more time telling us about the high speed train network in China, and how we should visit China just to take the train, than about the garden itself - and I started to wonder if he was on commission.
However, things quickly improved as we finally moved out of the entrance hallway and into the garden itself. It really is lovely, and it was great to hear about the reasons for each design feature (it's all about contrasts).
Contrast between square and circle
The pool was made deliberately cloudy, to create better reflections
After the official tour we warmed up with tea and dodgy calligraphy, and then I (and the Kiwi and one of the Italian guys) continued to wander around the garden, chatting quietly (I provided them with several suggestions for their remaining days in Vancouver!) It was so peaceful, a great change of pace from city life. Definitely recommended!
I wandered into the main downtown core, had a late lunch at Trees cafe (site of one of my worst first (or indeed any) dates of all time, but I hold no grudges), tried on (but didn't buy) a couple of pairs of shoes, then SkyTrained out to Burnaby to meet Mr E Man at our friends' house for the 4pm Canucks game.
Thursday
This time, cycling was the wrong decision - the heavens opened about five minutes after I left home, and I was drenched and freezing before I'd even made it onto the sea wall. I turned left this time, rather than right, and pedalled as fast as my frozen, wet legs would take me along the southern edge of False Creek. The foul weather was mitigated somewhat by the opportunity to be the only person on the stretch of path that goes through the shiny new Olympic village development (it was too cold to stop and take photos, sorry), but only a little bit.
I paused to cast a lingering, longing look at the lovely warm Granville Island public market, but kept going, and was soon locking up my bike outside the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
This wasn't part of my original staycation plan, but I'd spotted a Groupon a couple of weeks earlier, and thought why not? I love boats, having been brought up watching old naval battle movies with my Mum, and the museum has a great one as its centrepiece. The St. Roch was an RCMP supply ship that was the first to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (second overall), and the first to completely circumnavigate North America (see, I was paying attention!) I love stories of polar exploration just as much as I love boats, so I greatly enjoyed the video about the boat's voyages and especially the chance to get on board, poking around the crew quarters and climbing ladders all over the place.
View from the bridge of the St. Roch. Note mangy stuffed walrus on the starboard deck. The stuffed huskies (out of shot) were also rather tatty.
The boat exhibit was very well done, but I have to admit that the other display cases didn't do much for me at all - lots of models of old steam ships, that kind of thing. The museum was definitely worth visiting at the reduced Groupon rate, but I'm not sure I'd have felt the same way if I'd paid full price!
I thought again about heading straight for the cozy warmth of Granville Island, but decided to persevere with my cultural education and head to the adjacent Museum of Vancouver instead. Mr E Man and at least one other long-time Vancouver resident claimed to have never heard of the place, but I can confirm that it does indeed exist (tucked away in Vanier Park, in the same building as the Space Centre / Planetarium), and has a rather fetching crab sculpture outside:
That's a fountain, not the prevailing weather conditions, although admittedly it was hard to tell the difference
I was really, really cold at this point, and didn't want to stay too long, but I really liked the museum. The rotating exhibit was on local food production (backyard veggie gardens, beehives and chicken coops), which was quite interesting, but I liked the permanent exhibits much better. They had photos from when the site of the Marine Building downtown was literally an old growth forest, and then more photos, videos, and artifacts from that period right up to the 1970s, which was exceedingly cool (there aren't many cities with a full photographic record of their development from trees to skyscrapers!) I particularly enjoyed the wobbly film taken from the back of one of the old street cars - oh how I wish we still had them!
The exhibits were pretty comprehensive, and didn't gloss over the terrible treatment of the city's First Nations, Chinese, and Japanese inhabitants over the years (there's more comprehensive coverage of the city's original First Nations inhabitants at the excellent Museum of Anthropology, which I'd been to several times before and so didn't visit on my staycation). Overall I thought it was very well done, and good value for money. I'll be back, some day when I'm not quite so cold and wet!
Britain AND Scotland???!!! I don't see that working...
Onwards (in the still-pouring rain) to Granville Island, where I treated myself to fish and chips and a hot cup of tea and felt sooooo much better. I picked up more dinner ingredients before hauling my poor self through the pelting rain and up the steep hills to home, which is where the
For dinner, I roasted a Cornish game hen with fingerling potatoes, some adorable mini squash, and the rest of the asparagus and red pepper. We had some lovely olive bread with it, and some yumtastic chocolate brownies afterwards, as we watched the snow start to fall.
If I could shop at Granville Island every day, I'd cook more often, eat more healthily, and be completely broke.
Friday
I decided I'd had enough culture for one week, and went shopping instead. I trawled all my favourite vintage stores on Main Street, and although I didn't find the perfect burgundy leather jacket that I've had in my mind's eye for a couple of years now, I did manage to find a funky sweater and two very nice, very gently used winter coats (one grey, one tweedy one that I can actually wear with brown pants without looking like an eejit) for a combined total of $82. I suspect the grey one might actually be a guy's jacket, despite being bought from a women's clothing store (the shoulders are ever so slightly boxier, and the arms are ever so slightly longer, than usual, and the buttons are on the wrong side), but hey, it looks good on me IMNSHO and it cost $35, so who cares.
I met up with Mr E Man halfway through the day for a tasty lunch at one of our favourite restaurants, The Reef, and then again in the late afternoon for tea and cake at The Grind. I love this place - the front part is just your average coffee shop, but the back room is a cozy haven full of mismatched schoolroom-type furniture and is a great place to hang out and read or write. Before Mr E Man arrived I wrote a proper letter to my sister (who STILL doesn't have internet at her apartment in London, where she's been for over a year now. I am Not Impressed), but didn't manage any other writing.
In fact, not doing much writing was an ongoing theme of my staycation, and the only disappointment (I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of it and have considered starting to play the lottery so I can bum around parks and museums and coffee shops and watch early east coast hockey games all the time). This was mostly because of Mr E Man unexpectedly being off work - I left home later each day, and came home earlier, than I would have if he was working his usual 11-12 hour days, leaving less time for writing between my visits to all the galleries, parks, and museums. I really enjoyed what little writing I did do, and I'd like to build more writing time into my regular schedule. If I'm home with Mr E Man I tend to get distracted by conversations, TV, the internet, and our traditional long Scrabble and card games, so I think I need to set aside some designated time each weekend (or maybe on the occasional work day lunchtime) to leave the house and go and write somewhere else. I think I made enough of a start on a couple of projects to get me over that initial hump and keep me working on them... time will tell!
Overall, I highly recommend a staycation. Especially if it's in Vancouver, which (as I said in my last post) I have fallen in love with all over again. It was so relaxing, and so much cheaper (and more eco-friendly - I went everywhere by bike or public transit) than any other vacation I've ever taken! I wanted a second week, to do more writing and exercise than I managed to fit into my busy sight-seeing schedule, but it was not to be, and it's back to waking up in the dark and braving the snow and ice on my way in to work.
I do enjoy my job (mostly), but, well, it aint no staycation.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
What I Did On My Staycation - Part I
(This got way too long for one post. Also, the return to work has been a wee bit stressful, and our internet connection at home is all messed up,so it's taken me ages to write it. Boooooo. I'll try to get Part II written soon! It'll even have photos!)
Monday
First of all, I slept in - bliss! I had a leisurely breakfast, then took the bus and SkyTrain down to the Vancouver Art Gallery. This is the same route I take on work days when I'm not cycling, although I usually get off a few stops earlier, and it was so much nicer than during the rush hour! I even had a lovely chat with a woman who was, like me, trying to decide whether to take the #8 (comes every five minutes, but is usually heaving and stops on almost every block and is therefore slooooow) or cross the road and wait for the faster #33 (stops only every two or three blocks, and is generally less crowded, but only comes every 15-30 minutes, depending on the time of day). I used my Translink iPhone app to figure out that the #33 was the best option (it almost always is), saw this woman wavering between the two stops, and decided to share my information with her. We continued our conversation all the way to the art gallery. She's new to my neighbourhood and, like me, is excited about some upcoming changes to the area (post to come!) I'm used to fighting for space, having my face wedged into a stranger's armpit, getting hit by people's backpacks, and/or dealing with general commuter rage (mine and others'), so this was a lovely surprise.
The gallery was very nice. I'm not a particularly arty person, and know next to nothing about art history or techniques, but I do enjoy looking at pretty and/or thought provoking things, and I love the general atmosphere of art galleries. I wasn't allowed to take photos, but I did jot down some notes on the pieces I enjoyed most: a glass box with First Nations designs and old family photos engraved into it, with a light inside, all alone in a small white room, such that the designs and photos were projected onto the walls (Marianne Nicolson - I think it was this one); and some stunning images of the recent BC forest fires by Evan Lee, who prints photos onto the reverse of the usual paper, then smears the ink around before it dries - like this.
I had some rooms completely to myself... until the school groups hit the building. This was the hidden flaw in my cunning "enjoy popular attractions in the weekday peace and quiet" plan... man, kids are loud, and big stone buildings are echoey! I escaped to the gallery's cafe for a healthy and tasty salad, although the echoes of kids yelling and adults scolding followed me, and then headed back to the galleries once things had quietened back down. I saw everything except one room before the usual gallery fatigue overtook me, and I even managed to avoid spending any money in the gift shop (I have such a weakness for blank journals to write in, and they had some gorgeous ones, but I reminded myself that I have a couple of still completely virgin journals at home). A success!
I headed off to the Salt Spring Coffee place on Main Street (excellent as always, especially because I had an ethicalDeal coupon) for my first installment of sitting in cafes pretending to be a writer, managed to write one blog post, and then got the bad news about Mr E Man's accident. So I headed home via our usual grocery store to sympathise with him over his poor mangled finger, make a quick-and-easy dinner (baked potatoes with sauteed garlicky mushrooms, leeks, and bacon, with grated cheese on top, of course), and watch the Canucks game.
Tuesday
I woke up to find a beautiful sunny day waiting for me - but with a crazy windstorm also in progress. I'd said on Sunday night that I'd spend the first sunny day of the week biking around Stanley Park, but the wind was a little intimidating - I don't tend to enjoy riding during gusts so strong that you have to pedal to get down the hills, and from past experience this looked like just such a day! However, this being November, there was no guarantee of any more nice weather during the rest of the week, so I decided to go for it. (Mr E Man was invited, but said he wanted to snuggle on the sofa with the kitties and feel sorry for himself. To be fair he was on some fairly strong pain killers and hadn't slept much, as he kept catching his injured hand on the duvet when he rolled over, and he woke up shouting in pain several times during the night).
It was indeed ridiculously windy, and I did have to pedal down all but the steepest hills on my way to the sea wall (pedestrian / bike path around the city's ocean front) at Science World. But I persevered, buoyed by the exhilarating sun-shining-on-snow-capped-mountains-and-sparkly-blue-ocean-and-glass-skyscrapers-and-sailboats view. It was a day in a million by any standards, one in a trillion for November - truly stunning. What little skill I may possess in the wielding of words and cameras is hopelessly inadequate; I just can't hope to capture the beauty and joy of the day.
I fought the headwind all the way around the northern edge of False Creek (actually an ocean inlet, hence the name), along the beach at English Bay, and into Stanley Park. The wind died down considerably as I headed east onto the more sheltered edge of the park, and I was even able to sit outside in the sunshine to enjoy the excellent tea and muffin I bought at the totem poles concession stand. I watched bald eagles and seagulls play in the wind, seemingly just for fun, and felt exceedingly glad not to be stuck in the office.
This feeling grew and grew as I made my way around the rest of the sea wall, and when I passed under the Lions Gate bridge, around the point, and back onto the more exposed western edge of the park, the sight of the ocean waves crashing into (and occasionally over) the wall made my heart sing with pure joy. There were a couple of other cyclists, four or five joggers, and several more walkers on the same stretch of sea wall, and every single one of us wore a massive grin across our face. It was... there are no words. Magnificent comes close. I hopped off my bike, sat on a rock on the beach, and fell in love with Vancouver all over again.
If I hadn't already moved here, I would have headed from the beach straight to the immigration office. Seeing as I'm already a card-carrying citizen, though, I headed back along the English Bay beach front and over the Burrard Street bridge (LOVE LOVE LOVE the new protected bike lanes, which I hadn't used before) and went to Granville Island for a very late lunch (red snapper soup and bread from The Stock Market, an old favourite from when I lived nearby and went to the public market most Sundays). I wandered around the blissfully uncrowded market, bought dinner ingredients from several different places, then enjoyed a sweet treat and some tea at the Blue Parrot cafe. I even did some proper writing - in a journal, with a pen! I just fleshed out some ideas for a project I've been thinking about for a while, but it was fun, and just how I'd imagined it might feel to sit in a cafe overlooking the ocean and pretend to be a writer.
Dinner was three different kinds of fresh ravioli (porcini mushroom, asparagus, and butternut squash) with spicy Italian sausage, asparagus, red pepper, and a yummy cilantro pesto from The Stock Market. Mr E Man agreed that I'd spent the day most productively.
Monday
First of all, I slept in - bliss! I had a leisurely breakfast, then took the bus and SkyTrain down to the Vancouver Art Gallery. This is the same route I take on work days when I'm not cycling, although I usually get off a few stops earlier, and it was so much nicer than during the rush hour! I even had a lovely chat with a woman who was, like me, trying to decide whether to take the #8 (comes every five minutes, but is usually heaving and stops on almost every block and is therefore slooooow) or cross the road and wait for the faster #33 (stops only every two or three blocks, and is generally less crowded, but only comes every 15-30 minutes, depending on the time of day). I used my Translink iPhone app to figure out that the #33 was the best option (it almost always is), saw this woman wavering between the two stops, and decided to share my information with her. We continued our conversation all the way to the art gallery. She's new to my neighbourhood and, like me, is excited about some upcoming changes to the area (post to come!) I'm used to fighting for space, having my face wedged into a stranger's armpit, getting hit by people's backpacks, and/or dealing with general commuter rage (mine and others'), so this was a lovely surprise.
The gallery was very nice. I'm not a particularly arty person, and know next to nothing about art history or techniques, but I do enjoy looking at pretty and/or thought provoking things, and I love the general atmosphere of art galleries. I wasn't allowed to take photos, but I did jot down some notes on the pieces I enjoyed most: a glass box with First Nations designs and old family photos engraved into it, with a light inside, all alone in a small white room, such that the designs and photos were projected onto the walls (Marianne Nicolson - I think it was this one); and some stunning images of the recent BC forest fires by Evan Lee, who prints photos onto the reverse of the usual paper, then smears the ink around before it dries - like this.
I had some rooms completely to myself... until the school groups hit the building. This was the hidden flaw in my cunning "enjoy popular attractions in the weekday peace and quiet" plan... man, kids are loud, and big stone buildings are echoey! I escaped to the gallery's cafe for a healthy and tasty salad, although the echoes of kids yelling and adults scolding followed me, and then headed back to the galleries once things had quietened back down. I saw everything except one room before the usual gallery fatigue overtook me, and I even managed to avoid spending any money in the gift shop (I have such a weakness for blank journals to write in, and they had some gorgeous ones, but I reminded myself that I have a couple of still completely virgin journals at home). A success!
I headed off to the Salt Spring Coffee place on Main Street (excellent as always, especially because I had an ethicalDeal coupon) for my first installment of sitting in cafes pretending to be a writer, managed to write one blog post, and then got the bad news about Mr E Man's accident. So I headed home via our usual grocery store to sympathise with him over his poor mangled finger, make a quick-and-easy dinner (baked potatoes with sauteed garlicky mushrooms, leeks, and bacon, with grated cheese on top, of course), and watch the Canucks game.
Tuesday
I woke up to find a beautiful sunny day waiting for me - but with a crazy windstorm also in progress. I'd said on Sunday night that I'd spend the first sunny day of the week biking around Stanley Park, but the wind was a little intimidating - I don't tend to enjoy riding during gusts so strong that you have to pedal to get down the hills, and from past experience this looked like just such a day! However, this being November, there was no guarantee of any more nice weather during the rest of the week, so I decided to go for it. (Mr E Man was invited, but said he wanted to snuggle on the sofa with the kitties and feel sorry for himself. To be fair he was on some fairly strong pain killers and hadn't slept much, as he kept catching his injured hand on the duvet when he rolled over, and he woke up shouting in pain several times during the night).
It was indeed ridiculously windy, and I did have to pedal down all but the steepest hills on my way to the sea wall (pedestrian / bike path around the city's ocean front) at Science World. But I persevered, buoyed by the exhilarating sun-shining-on-snow-capped-mountains-and-sparkly-blue-ocean-and-glass-skyscrapers-and-sailboats view. It was a day in a million by any standards, one in a trillion for November - truly stunning. What little skill I may possess in the wielding of words and cameras is hopelessly inadequate; I just can't hope to capture the beauty and joy of the day.
I fought the headwind all the way around the northern edge of False Creek (actually an ocean inlet, hence the name), along the beach at English Bay, and into Stanley Park. The wind died down considerably as I headed east onto the more sheltered edge of the park, and I was even able to sit outside in the sunshine to enjoy the excellent tea and muffin I bought at the totem poles concession stand. I watched bald eagles and seagulls play in the wind, seemingly just for fun, and felt exceedingly glad not to be stuck in the office.
This feeling grew and grew as I made my way around the rest of the sea wall, and when I passed under the Lions Gate bridge, around the point, and back onto the more exposed western edge of the park, the sight of the ocean waves crashing into (and occasionally over) the wall made my heart sing with pure joy. There were a couple of other cyclists, four or five joggers, and several more walkers on the same stretch of sea wall, and every single one of us wore a massive grin across our face. It was... there are no words. Magnificent comes close. I hopped off my bike, sat on a rock on the beach, and fell in love with Vancouver all over again.
If I hadn't already moved here, I would have headed from the beach straight to the immigration office. Seeing as I'm already a card-carrying citizen, though, I headed back along the English Bay beach front and over the Burrard Street bridge (LOVE LOVE LOVE the new protected bike lanes, which I hadn't used before) and went to Granville Island for a very late lunch (red snapper soup and bread from The Stock Market, an old favourite from when I lived nearby and went to the public market most Sundays). I wandered around the blissfully uncrowded market, bought dinner ingredients from several different places, then enjoyed a sweet treat and some tea at the Blue Parrot cafe. I even did some proper writing - in a journal, with a pen! I just fleshed out some ideas for a project I've been thinking about for a while, but it was fun, and just how I'd imagined it might feel to sit in a cafe overlooking the ocean and pretend to be a writer.
Dinner was three different kinds of fresh ravioli (porcini mushroom, asparagus, and butternut squash) with spicy Italian sausage, asparagus, red pepper, and a yummy cilantro pesto from The Stock Market. Mr E Man agreed that I'd spent the day most productively.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Should I stay(cation), or should I go (to White Rock)?
This is Day One of my staycation! I've been to the art gallery and am now poncing about in a cafe with my MacBook, pretending to be a writer. Too bad I forgot to clean the laptop screen and outer casing before I came out, but hey, maybe the smudges add to the bohemian look.
I originally declared the weekend that's just finished to be the beginning of my staycation, but then Nina pointed out on Facebook that it doesn't count because I didn't stay at home. So let's call it a pre-staycation vacation.
It was another moment of genius from Mr E Man. Our friend and former tenant had invited us for dinner and a mini-party in White Rock, about a 40 minute drive away. Recent changes to the BC drinking and driving laws mean that two glasses of wine now put you over the limit, so a commitment to driving home would also be a commitment to being the only sober people at the party (and this friend is known for her parties). She said we could stay over - but she'd made the same offer to several other people, mostly our biggest male friends, and only has a small apartment. Images of drunken, snoring sardines swam into my mind...
...until Saturday lunch time, when Mr E Man said "right, let's get a B&B and make a weekend of it".
I knew I married a genius.
Amazingly for a miserably wet weekend in November, the first few places we called were full, but we found somewhere eventually. According to Google Maps it was 600 metres from our friend's house - score! So we threw some stuff in a bag, gave the kitties some extra food and water, and jumped in the car.
Now, I'd never been to White Rock before, but it instantly looked very familiar. Like many places in and around Vancouver, I'm sure it's been featured in a gazillion movies and TV shows (checks IMDB: yep, items 2-7 on the list explain it). We checked into our B&B, ran a couple of errands (our friend had called while we were on the road with a unique request: "hey, can ya pick up a couple of laser pointers for me?"), and then - because my parents raised me to always politely support the local brewing and hospitality industries of every vacation destination - it was time to meet up with some other visiting friends for the Canucks-Leafs hockey game! And what a game it was - with two parties of Leafs fans present in the bar, for added fun and insults.
Game over, we headed to dinner (three different kinds of lasagna) and the after-party. It was great fun, even though I got into a rather heated argument of the cyclist vs. motorist variety (hey, Mr E Man warned the guy not to start with me on that topic...) I met some lovely new people, and had a very deep and meaningful conversation with one of our quieter friends, who later drunkenly declared "I'm so happy that you and [Mr E Man] met each other!"
Good times...
...until it was time to go home.
I'd noticed on our way in that White Rock streets are on some of the steepest hills in existence. I mean, seriously, it's like they paved some cliffs on a dare and called them roads. Some of the sidewalks have to have hand rails and little mini-risers to stop people's legs from running away with them when they walk downhill.
And the 600 metres back to the B&B?
Uphill.
That was fun. But we made it back safely, even though we'd neglected to bring ropes and crampons, and also survived the rather hungover breakfast-with-strangers-in-their-own-house aspect of the B&B experience.
And then... the obligatory walk on the beach in the mist and the rain!
I actually really love beach resorts in the winter. There's such a melancholy air to them. White Rock did not disappoint - we walked along the beach, skipped some stones, and walked along the pier, serenaded by the fog-muffled quacks and honks of ducks and geese, and the whistle of a train making its way along the water front.
And, of course, we went to visit the white rock.
Mr E Man told me about this rock in the car out there, and I thought the whole thing was hysterical. The original rock had a white top, apparently due to guano. It was so distinctive that sailors used it as a navigational aid. But once the town was named after the rock, they apparently decided the white top wasn't enough...
...so they painted the whole damn thing white.
The informational sign next to the rock skips this part of the story, but it's pretty damn obvious.
I originally declared the weekend that's just finished to be the beginning of my staycation, but then Nina pointed out on Facebook that it doesn't count because I didn't stay at home. So let's call it a pre-staycation vacation.
It was another moment of genius from Mr E Man. Our friend and former tenant had invited us for dinner and a mini-party in White Rock, about a 40 minute drive away. Recent changes to the BC drinking and driving laws mean that two glasses of wine now put you over the limit, so a commitment to driving home would also be a commitment to being the only sober people at the party (and this friend is known for her parties). She said we could stay over - but she'd made the same offer to several other people, mostly our biggest male friends, and only has a small apartment. Images of drunken, snoring sardines swam into my mind...
...until Saturday lunch time, when Mr E Man said "right, let's get a B&B and make a weekend of it".
I knew I married a genius.
Amazingly for a miserably wet weekend in November, the first few places we called were full, but we found somewhere eventually. According to Google Maps it was 600 metres from our friend's house - score! So we threw some stuff in a bag, gave the kitties some extra food and water, and jumped in the car.
Now, I'd never been to White Rock before, but it instantly looked very familiar. Like many places in and around Vancouver, I'm sure it's been featured in a gazillion movies and TV shows (checks IMDB: yep, items 2-7 on the list explain it). We checked into our B&B, ran a couple of errands (our friend had called while we were on the road with a unique request: "hey, can ya pick up a couple of laser pointers for me?"), and then - because my parents raised me to always politely support the local brewing and hospitality industries of every vacation destination - it was time to meet up with some other visiting friends for the Canucks-Leafs hockey game! And what a game it was - with two parties of Leafs fans present in the bar, for added fun and insults.
Game over, we headed to dinner (three different kinds of lasagna) and the after-party. It was great fun, even though I got into a rather heated argument of the cyclist vs. motorist variety (hey, Mr E Man warned the guy not to start with me on that topic...) I met some lovely new people, and had a very deep and meaningful conversation with one of our quieter friends, who later drunkenly declared "I'm so happy that you and [Mr E Man] met each other!"
Good times...
...until it was time to go home.
I'd noticed on our way in that White Rock streets are on some of the steepest hills in existence. I mean, seriously, it's like they paved some cliffs on a dare and called them roads. Some of the sidewalks have to have hand rails and little mini-risers to stop people's legs from running away with them when they walk downhill.
And the 600 metres back to the B&B?
Uphill.
That was fun. But we made it back safely, even though we'd neglected to bring ropes and crampons, and also survived the rather hungover breakfast-with-strangers-in-their-own-house aspect of the B&B experience.
And then... the obligatory walk on the beach in the mist and the rain!
A white rock in White Rock
I actually really love beach resorts in the winter. There's such a melancholy air to them. White Rock did not disappoint - we walked along the beach, skipped some stones, and walked along the pier, serenaded by the fog-muffled quacks and honks of ducks and geese, and the whistle of a train making its way along the water front.
And, of course, we went to visit the white rock.
Mr E Man told me about this rock in the car out there, and I thought the whole thing was hysterical. The original rock had a white top, apparently due to guano. It was so distinctive that sailors used it as a navigational aid. But once the town was named after the rock, they apparently decided the white top wasn't enough...
...so they painted the whole damn thing white.
The white rock in White Rock. This pose was Mr E Man's idea; I think he enjoys testing the limits of how cheesy I'm prepared to be on my blog
The informational sign next to the rock skips this part of the story, but it's pretty damn obvious.
I guess "Grey Rock Painted White, Badly" isn't as good of a name for a town
Well, I've just had a call from Mr E Man informing me that he's just back from getting some stitches at the hospital after injuring his finger by catching a falling router at work - while it was running. He's going to be off work for two weeks, but he's basically fine. He claims he did it all for me, so he can spend more time with me on my staycation, and please can I bring him some chocolate? So off I go, back out into the rain! It's a hard life, pretending to be a writer...
Mr E Man ponders how cheesy HE is prepared to be on my blog
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Days of hours of minutes
A blog buddy (who may or may not wish to identify themselves in the comments) posted a wee ditty on their Facebook page recently that rang very true indeed:
The meetings themselves are hard work, both physically and mentally. I type and type and type almost non-stop for hours on end, battling through the hand, wrist and shoulder pains (laptop keyboards are not designed for such marathon sessions) as I try to capture every single little thing that's said, struggling with the balance between brevity and speed versus future intelligibility. Unlike the other attendees I can't zone out or divert my attention to another task even for a couple of minutes, a lesson I learned the hard way after embarrassingly failing to capture an important action item at one of my first meetings with these collaborators, while I was checking my (work!) email. I even have to keep typing during the coffee and lunch breaks, as people come up to me asking for additions to be made to the minutes following one-on-one conversations they just had with another attendee while getting their coffee.
The most stressful part comes at the end of each day, though, when I'm asked for a list of all the action items generated. This request took me completely by surprise the first time, but luckily I'd decided that it might be useful to have the action items highlighted in red text. Even now though it can be an embarrassing process that can make me look really stupid as I scroll through pages and pages of text** trying to read out the action items in a coherent manner. I'm not sure everyone realises that there's just not enough time in the heat of the moment to type in more than "ACTION: [PI] will get back to [collaborator] with answers to the above questions". This item might refer to a full page of discussion about how to proceed with a project, but makes no sense when read out in a list, separated from its original context.
I also colour code (in blue) any amusing little conversations or observations that pop up that can't go into the actual formal minutes, but that might make good blog fodder. The bloggable LOLs from this meeting include an amusing conversation:
a promise to myself:
and an observation from me about another lazy bit of technical jargon that, like "poor prognostic marker", doesn't stand up to grammatical scrutiny. This time the example was "spontaneous mouse models", which caused me to have to suppress a snigger as I imagined a bunch of white mice suddenly popping into existence in a lab. Sure, "mouse model of spontaneous tumour development" is more of a mouthful, but at least it's accurate.
Unlike the person in the verse , I do at least get to go to dinner - an excellent Mexican restaurant this last time. Mmmmm, guacomole. A few of us also enjoyed some excellent local beer on a beachfront patio on the second day, as the meeting finished a couple of hours early and we couldn't change our flights home. The chances of me growing thinner and thinner on one of these trips are, well, slim.
The effort continues when I get back to the office and have to prepare formal, neat versions of the notes for circulation to all internal and external collaborators and their bosses. I have to re-order the original minutes to capture follow-up comments and action items that someone suddenly thought of in the middle of a presentation about another project, to make the information flow more logically within and between sections, and to remove some of the more random dead-end tangents completely. I also have to clarify or remove any items that really don't make any sense (I'm usually too busy typing for any critical analysis of what I'm writing), and add some context into all the action items.
I also have to fix all the typos and auto-corrects, turning all the "serious ovation cancers" back into "serous ovarian cancers" and such, and adding all the optional little luxuries that I don't have time for during the actual meetings - luxuries such as full words, sentences, paragraphs, and grammar. You know, the minor details. Once that's done I can format the document, try to proofread it, realise I'm heartily sick of the damn thing and only be able to bring myself to skim it superficially, send it out, and then spot an embarrassing surviving typo as I go to close the document.
Oh well, at least I remembered to take out my observation about mice spontaneously popping into existence.
An action item about the cakes to be served at the next meeting did make it through, but that was deliberate.
Nope, definitely not gonna get any thinner playing this game.
------------
*Seen in minutes from a meeting that took place before my time, when the admin assistants were responsible for all minutes, including those of very technical meetings. Sentence should read "it was decided that prospective accrual would be better than retrospective analysis". I think.
**At the actual 1.5 day meeting I typed a total of 30 pages of notes, which translated to 31 pages of nicely formatted formal minutes with each major item starting on a new page.
just received something from a fellow sufferer that will only be funny to Secretaries (with a capital 'S'):The post made me literally laugh out loud. I'm responsible for taking minutes at several recurring meetings - it only takes one instance of "it was decided that the prospect of cruel would be better than the reflex perspective analysis*" to see why someone with a scientific background is needed for this task - and part of the reason for my relative bloggy silence recently is that I was down in San Diego last week at a research collaboration progress meeting, typing away so fast that I'm surprised my laptop keyboard is still intact and functional.
"And so while the great ones depart to their dinner,
The Secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner.
Racking his brain to record and report,
What he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought."
The meetings themselves are hard work, both physically and mentally. I type and type and type almost non-stop for hours on end, battling through the hand, wrist and shoulder pains (laptop keyboards are not designed for such marathon sessions) as I try to capture every single little thing that's said, struggling with the balance between brevity and speed versus future intelligibility. Unlike the other attendees I can't zone out or divert my attention to another task even for a couple of minutes, a lesson I learned the hard way after embarrassingly failing to capture an important action item at one of my first meetings with these collaborators, while I was checking my (work!) email. I even have to keep typing during the coffee and lunch breaks, as people come up to me asking for additions to be made to the minutes following one-on-one conversations they just had with another attendee while getting their coffee.
The most stressful part comes at the end of each day, though, when I'm asked for a list of all the action items generated. This request took me completely by surprise the first time, but luckily I'd decided that it might be useful to have the action items highlighted in red text. Even now though it can be an embarrassing process that can make me look really stupid as I scroll through pages and pages of text** trying to read out the action items in a coherent manner. I'm not sure everyone realises that there's just not enough time in the heat of the moment to type in more than "ACTION: [PI] will get back to [collaborator] with answers to the above questions". This item might refer to a full page of discussion about how to proceed with a project, but makes no sense when read out in a list, separated from its original context.
I also colour code (in blue) any amusing little conversations or observations that pop up that can't go into the actual formal minutes, but that might make good blog fodder. The bloggable LOLs from this meeting include an amusing conversation:
My boss: "Who did this scoring and analysis? This project needs to be led by a human pathologist".
Hilarious collaborator: "Well, he's definitely human..."
a promise to myself:
"I hereby swear to never, ever, use 'homozygose' as a verb" (my boss had just done this, in the context of trying to engineer a cell line homozygous for a gene mutation that we only ever see as a heterozygote in a certain tumour type).
and an observation from me about another lazy bit of technical jargon that, like "poor prognostic marker", doesn't stand up to grammatical scrutiny. This time the example was "spontaneous mouse models", which caused me to have to suppress a snigger as I imagined a bunch of white mice suddenly popping into existence in a lab. Sure, "mouse model of spontaneous tumour development" is more of a mouthful, but at least it's accurate.
Unlike the person in the verse , I do at least get to go to dinner - an excellent Mexican restaurant this last time. Mmmmm, guacomole. A few of us also enjoyed some excellent local beer on a beachfront patio on the second day, as the meeting finished a couple of hours early and we couldn't change our flights home. The chances of me growing thinner and thinner on one of these trips are, well, slim.
The effort continues when I get back to the office and have to prepare formal, neat versions of the notes for circulation to all internal and external collaborators and their bosses. I have to re-order the original minutes to capture follow-up comments and action items that someone suddenly thought of in the middle of a presentation about another project, to make the information flow more logically within and between sections, and to remove some of the more random dead-end tangents completely. I also have to clarify or remove any items that really don't make any sense (I'm usually too busy typing for any critical analysis of what I'm writing), and add some context into all the action items.
I also have to fix all the typos and auto-corrects, turning all the "serious ovation cancers" back into "serous ovarian cancers" and such, and adding all the optional little luxuries that I don't have time for during the actual meetings - luxuries such as full words, sentences, paragraphs, and grammar. You know, the minor details. Once that's done I can format the document, try to proofread it, realise I'm heartily sick of the damn thing and only be able to bring myself to skim it superficially, send it out, and then spot an embarrassing surviving typo as I go to close the document.
Oh well, at least I remembered to take out my observation about mice spontaneously popping into existence.
An action item about the cakes to be served at the next meeting did make it through, but that was deliberate.
Nope, definitely not gonna get any thinner playing this game.
------------
*Seen in minutes from a meeting that took place before my time, when the admin assistants were responsible for all minutes, including those of very technical meetings. Sentence should read "it was decided that prospective accrual would be better than retrospective analysis". I think.
**At the actual 1.5 day meeting I typed a total of 30 pages of notes, which translated to 31 pages of nicely formatted formal minutes with each major item starting on a new page.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Destination: Sound!
It always seems to take me a while to write blog posts about my favourite trips, probably because I'm in denial about them being over. So the fact that it's taken me almost a month to start writing this post is a good indication that it was an amazing adventure in my new favourite kayaking destination!
The start of the trip was an almost exact replica of our last one - drive, ferry, drive, stay at mother-in-law's, drive, ferry, drive, buy food and other supplies*, drive - but instead of continuing up the road to Lund, we turned right and headed for the kayak rental company's other location, in Okeover Inlet. As before, we'd booked a beast of a double kayak with a central hatch for all our gear, but got loaded up and in the water in record time. In fact we beat the couple next to us, who'd started loading a good half an hour before we did!
There was much friendly banter between us as we raced to launch... and again as we crossed their path on a brief trip back to the beach to retrieve Mr E Man's hat... and yet again as we passed them on our way back up the inlet, heading for Desolation Sound proper.
This part of the trip was pleasant enough, with nice cabins dotted about on the wooded slopes of the low-lying hills. As usual after a long land-locked spell, it was bliss just to be back out on the water, feeling the rhythm of the paddle strokes and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the ocean. The cabins became more widely dispersed as we passed from Okeover into Malaspina Inlet, but I was beginning to be ever so slightly disappointed in the low-lying hills, the signs of habitation, and the lack of any wildlife.
All this changed, however, when we turned right into Desolation Sound itself. There was some chop and some rebound waves to cope with as we rounded the point, but we've been through much, much worse before, and our heavily loaded double kayak wasn't going to flip unless we wanted it to**. But even as we zig-zagged around to make sure none of the many waves and boat wakes hit us broadside, we were already starting to admire the snow-capped mountains at either end of the Sound, and seeing an abundance of seals and eagles.
We kept expecting more kayakers to show up, but luckily when a group did come they chose another island, and we had ours completely to ourselves all day and all night. We cooked another yummy dinner, and settled in on the West-facing rock behind our campsite to watch the gorgeous sunset.
Sun down = bed time!
After another surprisingly decent night's sleep we got out of the tent early the next morning to find another beautiful day waiting for us, and jumped straight off a rock and into the ocean to celebrate. This was the only time on the whole trip I ever felt cold. After a brief swim and some breakfast, we hauled the kayak back down onto the beach in a series of painful steps (the low tides were all at really inconvenient times on this trip!), and set off on a day trip to Tenedos Bay. It was another gorgeous paddle, followed by a short walk through the woods to Unwin Lake for a freshwater swim. Unfortunately we had to clamber over a bunch of floating and semi-floating driftwood logs to get to the water... like that bit in Insomnia... this is the kind of thing I have nightmares about, and I fell off once into some shallow water and got covered in stinking black mud (and scraped my leg in the process), so I wasn't exactly happy. The lake was nice though,
and we met the couple we'd raced against to load and launch on day one. They were looking for a new campsite after being a little disappointed in how crowded their first two had been, so we told them how great our island was, and they promised to check it out.
After a couple of hours of enjoying the really very pleasant lake, Mr E Man said what I'd been thinking: "this is nice, but it's not as nice as our campsite. I love our campsite. It's awesome". So we agreed to head back to base to see who had invaded our island while we'd been gone. The couple we'd talked to had, as had one other couple and another group of four much younger kayakers, but we were still nicely spread out and everyone had their own space and privacy.
Our new friends from the loading beach and the lake were surviving on freeze-dried food, whereas we had an overabundance of real food, so we shared our pasta dinner with them in exchange for some additional wine. After dinner the other couple joined the four of us on the sunset rock with yet more wine (the group of four younger paddlers kept to themselves), and we all proceeded to spend an extremely lovely evening chatting and getting pleasantly drunk together as the sun went down (and for a few hours afterwards too).
After a not so good night's sleep (too much wine), our drinking partners all left for home or for pastures new. Mr E Man and I had a swim and then a discussion over breakfast, and decided that we really weren't going to find anywhere better than where we already were (based on our own observations and on tales from our new friends), and that lifting the kayak up and down all the rocky ledges was going to be more trouble than it was worth. So we celebrated BC Day by spending a lazy day at camp: swimming, playing cards, swimming, playing Scrabble, swimming, reading, swimming, eating, and swimming. It was bliss, and we felt no guilt at all about our "enjoy the destination" mode of ocean kayaking***.
Some new kayakers showed up, and we pointed out the best campsites and chatted briefly, but they seemed inclined to keep to themselves, as did the younger paddlers when they returned from their day trip. But yet again we had a fabulous evening chatting and snuggling and watching the sunset and drinking the last of the wine.
That night I crawled into the tent to sleep, little suspecting the horrors that awaited me. The first three nights had been fine, with little more than the sound of the waves to disturb my sleep, so I'd been lulled into a false sense of security. This made it all the worse when I was awoken at about 2:45 am by The Noise.
It was a kind of combination barking/snorting/coughing/teeth chomping noise. Definitely an animal. A big animal. A big, loud, scary animal. The Noise started on one side of the tent, then moved to the other.
Unbelievably, Mr E Man was still asleep at this point. But not for long, because I switched on the flashlight that hangs from the ceiling of our tent and started shaking him and frantically whispering "DO YOU HEAR THAT???!!! I THINK THERE'S A BEAR!!!!!!"
As a born and bred Canadian, Mr E Man does not share my terror of bears. I keep trying to explain to him that to Europeans, big scary animals with huge teeth that live in the woods and make scary noises are the domain of fairy tales, things that frighten and thrill you when you're a kid, but aren't supposed to be real. So when we do something ridiculously foolhardy like move to Canada, we freak the hell out as our childhood nightmares come to life.
Or something.
Anyway, Mr E Man initially seemed freaked out by the noise too, but then calmly tried to talk me out of my own fear by saying "it's probably a seal. Maybe a sea lion. It's low tide, right? It's probably eating those oysters and clams we saw on the beach when we arrived at low tide".
Yeah, nice try dude. Bears swim and eat shellfish too - our new friends had met someone who'd had a bear wander through his nearby island campsite the day before, also at low tide - and anyway I've heard seals and sea lions, and they just don't make that kind of noise. Or move that fast, on land (The Noise was moving. A lot).
At this point Mr E Man realised that I was too scared to be talked down, so he decided to get out of the tent to see what was happening. Bear spray in one hand and air horn in the other, he peered bravely out into the darkness, but couldn't see anything. A new and slightly different (chompier) occurrence of The Noise, closer this time, persuaded him that he really didn't want to startle or otherwise disturb the maker of The Noise, so he slipped discretely back into the tent. Luckily The Noise soon started to gradually move a little further away, and after a couple of hours of listening intently into the night while sitting up facing the door of the tent, gripping the can of bear spray with white knuckles, I relaxed enough to fall back asleep (Mr E Man had been snoring away within a few minutes of getting back into the tent).
I left the light on, though.
I'd had maybe 20 minutes of sleep when The Noise came back, closer than ever. It was now 5:45 and starting to get light, but it was still too dark for courage. I shook poor Mr E Man awake again, and he declared that he absolutely had to know what it was, and picked up the air horn and bear spray again. I begged him not to go outside - The Noise sounded different, more aggressive somehow, than it had earlier - and he reluctantly relented. After another half hour or so The Noise was gone for good, taking my capacity for sleep along with it.
Of course, as soon as it was properly light and I was brave (or at least slightly braver) again, I regretted not finding out what had been making The Noise. We looked everywhere for prints or scat, but none were to be found on the rocks or scrubby grass and parched, hard crust of soil. Our bag of food, hanging on the end of a rope slung over a tree branch that we'd thought was probably too low, was undisturbed. Our neighbours had all heard The Noise, too, and everyone thought it was a bear. Even Mr E Man says that the more he thinks about it, the more he agrees that it couldn't have been a seal or sea lion. (Our neighbours had met someone who'd claimed to have seen a couple of wolves a few kilometres away the week before, but that's just silly).
Anyway, the thought of The Noise made me feel slightly better about having to leave our idyllic island campsite and head home. We had one last swim before hauling the kayak back down to the beach, packing up, and retracing our route from the first two days, back along the Sound, round the point, and into the Malaspina and Okeover Inlets. It was another nice paddle, although after the splendour of the last few days, the last hour's scenery seemed rather tame and pedestrian in comparison.
Overall it was an amazing trip and I got out of the kayak at the end covered in bruises, bug bites, sun burn, blisters, cuts and scrapes, but with a grin as wide as the Sound itself. Great weather, spectacular scenery, gorgeous campsites, great people, good times. Yes there are scary noises in the dark, but hey, now that I've had a bear in my campsite at night (one of my worst nightmares) and survived unscathed, maybe I'll be a bit braver in future.
A very little bit.
Maybe.
My fear of clambering over floating driftwood logs remains intact, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of more kayaking trips, either.
-----------------
*shopping while hungry caused a serious kayak hatch overload problem. We ate a ton of food, gave some away, and still brought a whole bunch back. Maybe next time Mr E Man will take my "let's plan meals in advance and make a shopping list" idea more seriously.
**having said that, I feel more vulnerable in the front of a double than I do in a single or in the back of a double. It's all about having control of your own rudder - without that control over my direction I get a bit nervous in choppy water!
***in the past, we've gone kayaking with people whose idea of a good trip is to cover as much distance as they possibly can each day. To each their own... but what we like most about kayaking is the access you get to beautiful, isolated camping spots. So we try to enjoy them as much as we can once we get there. Also, we're a wee bit lazy.
The start of the trip was an almost exact replica of our last one - drive, ferry, drive, stay at mother-in-law's, drive, ferry, drive, buy food and other supplies*, drive - but instead of continuing up the road to Lund, we turned right and headed for the kayak rental company's other location, in Okeover Inlet. As before, we'd booked a beast of a double kayak with a central hatch for all our gear, but got loaded up and in the water in record time. In fact we beat the couple next to us, who'd started loading a good half an hour before we did!
Come on you blues!
There was much friendly banter between us as we raced to launch... and again as we crossed their path on a brief trip back to the beach to retrieve Mr E Man's hat... and yet again as we passed them on our way back up the inlet, heading for Desolation Sound proper.
Approximate routes
This part of the trip was pleasant enough, with nice cabins dotted about on the wooded slopes of the low-lying hills. As usual after a long land-locked spell, it was bliss just to be back out on the water, feeling the rhythm of the paddle strokes and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the ocean. The cabins became more widely dispersed as we passed from Okeover into Malaspina Inlet, but I was beginning to be ever so slightly disappointed in the low-lying hills, the signs of habitation, and the lack of any wildlife.
All this changed, however, when we turned right into Desolation Sound itself. There was some chop and some rebound waves to cope with as we rounded the point, but we've been through much, much worse before, and our heavily loaded double kayak wasn't going to flip unless we wanted it to**. But even as we zig-zagged around to make sure none of the many waves and boat wakes hit us broadside, we were already starting to admire the snow-capped mountains at either end of the Sound, and seeing an abundance of seals and eagles.
Calmer water = photo time!
We found an island to camp on for the night, and apologised to the couple on the beach for disturbing their solitude. They very kindly helped us to carry the kayak up the sloping, stony beach to above the high tide line - even when empty it was a struggle for me to lift my end - and we had a nice chat with them before staking out our campsite, a short walk through the woods away. They'd recently retired and had driven an RV over from Alberta with two kayaks strapped to the roof, and were spending the whole summer on the BC coast, interspersing week-long kayak trips with more luxurious RV camping in various locations. I immediately started formulating "get rich quick and retire immediately" plans in my head (still working on it. I'll let you know if I make any progress. Or maybe I'll just buy an RV and some kayaks and bugger off and you won't ever hear from me again).
We got the tent up and went for a swim. Unlike on Savary and the Copelands (our last new favourite kayaking destinations), which as you can see from the map are very close to Desolation Sound but in a less sheltered piece of water, the water was gorgeous; cool enough to be refreshing, but warm enough to swim in for extended periods of time. And it was clear, and surprisingly fresh, for ocean water. There must be some massive rivers and/or glaciers feeding into the Sound somewhere, because the water didn't taste all that salty, and even after swimming multiple times a day for five days in a row, we didn't get that icky crusty salty feeling on our skin or hair.
We had a yummy gourmet hot-dog dinner, and settled in for the night as soon as it got dark. We could hear people in the cabins on the mainland shore, and on the many boats moored in the channel between our island and the mainland, but they all quietened down within an hour and I had a surprisingly good night's sleep, for a camping trip.
On our second day we re-loaded the kayak, said goodbye to our Albertan neighbours, and headed for our main destination. We'd heard that the Curme Islands were gorgeous, but "overrun with kayakers in the summer", according to one source. However, having started our trip on a Friday, rather than a Saturday, we thought we might have a head start on the BC Day long weekend traffic.
And so it proved to be! We saw one or two other kayakers on our crossing on calm waters over to the privately owned Mink Island, but they were mostly day trippers from boats and cabins. We were the first paddlers to reach the Curme group, and had a choice of several islands. We chose the one with the outhouse, and bagged the best of the three main tent sites: close to the landing beach (although we had to lift the boat up several levels of rock steps to get it above the high tide line, which took ages due to my wussy little girl muscles), with a dining room set made of driftwood logs, and with rocks behind us from which to fish, jump into the ocean, or watch the sunset.
After we got the tent up we explored our new home, and declared it to be the best campsite either of us had ever seen. The terrain was similar to that of the Copeland Islands, but with much sparser tree coverage and hence better views in all directions. At one point Mr E Man stuck the camera in my face without warning and said "do a video for your blog where you walk people through the island as if it's our new summer home". So here it is! (Sorry about the low volume - this was our regular camera rather than our actual video camera, and we forgot that the mic isn't as good).
As well as the American Canadian bald eagles, we saw oyster catchers, gulls, vultures, humming birds, squirrels, mice, and dozens and dozens of seals.
And here are some views from the other side of the island (spoiled only slightly by some water on the lens):
And here are some views from the other side of the island (spoiled only slightly by some water on the lens):
I swear I don't work for Tourism BC, I just really really like it here
We kept expecting more kayakers to show up, but luckily when a group did come they chose another island, and we had ours completely to ourselves all day and all night. We cooked another yummy dinner, and settled in on the West-facing rock behind our campsite to watch the gorgeous sunset.
Yes, I wear socks with my beloved Keens in the evenings when I'm camping (because of the mosquitoes). So sue me.
Smoke from distant forest fires makes for spectacular sunsets
Sun down = bed time!
After another surprisingly decent night's sleep we got out of the tent early the next morning to find another beautiful day waiting for us, and jumped straight off a rock and into the ocean to celebrate. This was the only time on the whole trip I ever felt cold. After a brief swim and some breakfast, we hauled the kayak back down onto the beach in a series of painful steps (the low tides were all at really inconvenient times on this trip!), and set off on a day trip to Tenedos Bay. It was another gorgeous paddle, followed by a short walk through the woods to Unwin Lake for a freshwater swim. Unfortunately we had to clamber over a bunch of floating and semi-floating driftwood logs to get to the water... like that bit in Insomnia... this is the kind of thing I have nightmares about, and I fell off once into some shallow water and got covered in stinking black mud (and scraped my leg in the process), so I wasn't exactly happy. The lake was nice though,
It turns out that it's really difficult to take self-portraits while treading water
and we met the couple we'd raced against to load and launch on day one. They were looking for a new campsite after being a little disappointed in how crowded their first two had been, so we told them how great our island was, and they promised to check it out.
After a couple of hours of enjoying the really very pleasant lake, Mr E Man said what I'd been thinking: "this is nice, but it's not as nice as our campsite. I love our campsite. It's awesome". So we agreed to head back to base to see who had invaded our island while we'd been gone. The couple we'd talked to had, as had one other couple and another group of four much younger kayakers, but we were still nicely spread out and everyone had their own space and privacy.
Our new friends from the loading beach and the lake were surviving on freeze-dried food, whereas we had an overabundance of real food, so we shared our pasta dinner with them in exchange for some additional wine. After dinner the other couple joined the four of us on the sunset rock with yet more wine (the group of four younger paddlers kept to themselves), and we all proceeded to spend an extremely lovely evening chatting and getting pleasantly drunk together as the sun went down (and for a few hours afterwards too).
After a not so good night's sleep (too much wine), our drinking partners all left for home or for pastures new. Mr E Man and I had a swim and then a discussion over breakfast, and decided that we really weren't going to find anywhere better than where we already were (based on our own observations and on tales from our new friends), and that lifting the kayak up and down all the rocky ledges was going to be more trouble than it was worth. So we celebrated BC Day by spending a lazy day at camp: swimming, playing cards, swimming, playing Scrabble, swimming, reading, swimming, eating, and swimming. It was bliss, and we felt no guilt at all about our "enjoy the destination" mode of ocean kayaking***.
Improving our "taking self portraits while treading water" technique slightly.
Some new kayakers showed up, and we pointed out the best campsites and chatted briefly, but they seemed inclined to keep to themselves, as did the younger paddlers when they returned from their day trip. But yet again we had a fabulous evening chatting and snuggling and watching the sunset and drinking the last of the wine.
That night I crawled into the tent to sleep, little suspecting the horrors that awaited me. The first three nights had been fine, with little more than the sound of the waves to disturb my sleep, so I'd been lulled into a false sense of security. This made it all the worse when I was awoken at about 2:45 am by The Noise.
It was a kind of combination barking/snorting/coughing/teeth chomping noise. Definitely an animal. A big animal. A big, loud, scary animal. The Noise started on one side of the tent, then moved to the other.
Unbelievably, Mr E Man was still asleep at this point. But not for long, because I switched on the flashlight that hangs from the ceiling of our tent and started shaking him and frantically whispering "DO YOU HEAR THAT???!!! I THINK THERE'S A BEAR!!!!!!"
As a born and bred Canadian, Mr E Man does not share my terror of bears. I keep trying to explain to him that to Europeans, big scary animals with huge teeth that live in the woods and make scary noises are the domain of fairy tales, things that frighten and thrill you when you're a kid, but aren't supposed to be real. So when we do something ridiculously foolhardy like move to Canada, we freak the hell out as our childhood nightmares come to life.
Or something.
Anyway, Mr E Man initially seemed freaked out by the noise too, but then calmly tried to talk me out of my own fear by saying "it's probably a seal. Maybe a sea lion. It's low tide, right? It's probably eating those oysters and clams we saw on the beach when we arrived at low tide".
Yeah, nice try dude. Bears swim and eat shellfish too - our new friends had met someone who'd had a bear wander through his nearby island campsite the day before, also at low tide - and anyway I've heard seals and sea lions, and they just don't make that kind of noise. Or move that fast, on land (The Noise was moving. A lot).
At this point Mr E Man realised that I was too scared to be talked down, so he decided to get out of the tent to see what was happening. Bear spray in one hand and air horn in the other, he peered bravely out into the darkness, but couldn't see anything. A new and slightly different (chompier) occurrence of The Noise, closer this time, persuaded him that he really didn't want to startle or otherwise disturb the maker of The Noise, so he slipped discretely back into the tent. Luckily The Noise soon started to gradually move a little further away, and after a couple of hours of listening intently into the night while sitting up facing the door of the tent, gripping the can of bear spray with white knuckles, I relaxed enough to fall back asleep (Mr E Man had been snoring away within a few minutes of getting back into the tent).
I left the light on, though.
I'd had maybe 20 minutes of sleep when The Noise came back, closer than ever. It was now 5:45 and starting to get light, but it was still too dark for courage. I shook poor Mr E Man awake again, and he declared that he absolutely had to know what it was, and picked up the air horn and bear spray again. I begged him not to go outside - The Noise sounded different, more aggressive somehow, than it had earlier - and he reluctantly relented. After another half hour or so The Noise was gone for good, taking my capacity for sleep along with it.
Of course, as soon as it was properly light and I was brave (or at least slightly braver) again, I regretted not finding out what had been making The Noise. We looked everywhere for prints or scat, but none were to be found on the rocks or scrubby grass and parched, hard crust of soil. Our bag of food, hanging on the end of a rope slung over a tree branch that we'd thought was probably too low, was undisturbed. Our neighbours had all heard The Noise, too, and everyone thought it was a bear. Even Mr E Man says that the more he thinks about it, the more he agrees that it couldn't have been a seal or sea lion. (Our neighbours had met someone who'd claimed to have seen a couple of wolves a few kilometres away the week before, but that's just silly).
Anyway, the thought of The Noise made me feel slightly better about having to leave our idyllic island campsite and head home. We had one last swim before hauling the kayak back down to the beach, packing up, and retracing our route from the first two days, back along the Sound, round the point, and into the Malaspina and Okeover Inlets. It was another nice paddle, although after the splendour of the last few days, the last hour's scenery seemed rather tame and pedestrian in comparison.
Overall it was an amazing trip and I got out of the kayak at the end covered in bruises, bug bites, sun burn, blisters, cuts and scrapes, but with a grin as wide as the Sound itself. Great weather, spectacular scenery, gorgeous campsites, great people, good times. Yes there are scary noises in the dark, but hey, now that I've had a bear in my campsite at night (one of my worst nightmares) and survived unscathed, maybe I'll be a bit braver in future.
A very little bit.
Maybe.
My fear of clambering over floating driftwood logs remains intact, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of more kayaking trips, either.
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*shopping while hungry caused a serious kayak hatch overload problem. We ate a ton of food, gave some away, and still brought a whole bunch back. Maybe next time Mr E Man will take my "let's plan meals in advance and make a shopping list" idea more seriously.
**having said that, I feel more vulnerable in the front of a double than I do in a single or in the back of a double. It's all about having control of your own rudder - without that control over my direction I get a bit nervous in choppy water!
***in the past, we've gone kayaking with people whose idea of a good trip is to cover as much distance as they possibly can each day. To each their own... but what we like most about kayaking is the access you get to beautiful, isolated camping spots. So we try to enjoy them as much as we can once we get there. Also, we're a wee bit lazy.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
A walk in the woods: choose wisely
Which path would you choose?
Would the adjacent sign affect your decision?
(Shmeegs?)
Would you consider the relative scariness and likelihood of this...
...compared to this?
Would the sight of vultures circling overhead affect your decision making?
(is there a fresh bear kill in the woods, or are they waiting for the siren dinner bell?)
This was our final choice.
It seemed to be a good one.
This was our Sunday lunchtime cool-down during The Big Time Out, a music festival in Cumberland on Vancouver Island. The record-breaking heat (something like 36C on Saturday - that's 97F) may have affected my opinion somewhat, but I have to say that while it was a fun weekend and an amazing setting,
the line-up was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of "this is OK" or "oh, these guys have some decent stuff", not much "WOW, these guys are AWESOME!"
Saturday was especially meh - the opening act was the best one all day, and while the headliners (Broken Social Scene) were also very good, the penultimate band had managed to suck most of the energy out of the crowd by the time they came on, so it was all a bit muted.
Sunday was better - the dip in the river was better preparation for the day than sweating in the tiny patch of shade thrown by our hastily rigged tarp had been the day before. But while the headliner K'naan rocked the house as usual, he didn't have any new songs; it was essentially the same set we saw him do in Vancouver in March 2009. I guess a whole year spent on the World Cup music tour precludes much writing of new material. But still, great set, and he and a couple of other bands we saw over the two days (Ruby Jean and the Thoughtful Bees, Vitaminsforyou, Mutaytor, Kim Churchill, and especially Tambura Rasa) inspired some happy "dancing barefoot on the grass" moments in me. And as this was a very small festival, there was a really nice friendly atmosphere with lots of happy people and little kids running around all over the place. All very different to my previous music festival experiences - all in Scotland, at massive events with two stages, multiple gig tents, fairgrounds, and drunken Scots everywhere!
Overall though, my main impression of the event was of overwhelming, baking heat. Oh, except at night, when it was freezing! There was about an hour of comfortable temperature in the morning, and maybe a couple of hours in the evening, but the rest of the time was spent either sweating buckets and trying not to move, or shivering in all the clothes I'd brought. The festival and adjacent campsite were in an open field, with very little shade. We got lucky and bagged a spot next to the fence, so we pooled resources (tarps and blankets) with one of our neighbours to set up a small patch of (still baking hot) shade between the fence and our tents. The poor people who arrived later and camped in the middle of the field had no shade at all though. It's rained at every single other music festival I've ever been to - on one memorable occasion at T in the Park in Scotland it got so muddy that some of the tents in the sloping campsite started to slide downhill - and that's always miserable and muddy and nasty, but surely there's a happy medium somewhere!
In these circumstances, we declared this frozen mango impaled on a stick
to be the best thing ever invented in the history of humanity. I literally felt new energy flooding back into my poor heat-sensitive Celtic body as I ate it.
Mmmmmm, mangogasm.
There was also the usual lack of sleep that you get at festivals. The tents were all packed in like sardines, and some of our other neighbours were the loudest, douchiest, most obnoxious people on the site. Their conversation kept everyone in the vicinity awake from 1 - 5:30 am on the first night as one guy shared tales of all his sexual conquests in quite an aggressive, nasty way (and repeated everything at least once to make sure he'd been heard). At one point I whispered to Mr E Man "wow, that guy must have a really, really small penis", and after that we referred to him as Douchebag McTinydick, which made us feel better - as did the news Mr E Man overheard on Monday morning that the whole group had been so hungover and tired after that night that they fell asleep in their camp chairs and missed K'naan on the Sunday!
Karma - don't you just love it?!
Like I say though, overall it was a good weekend, with the swim in the river being the highlight. Oh, and we saw dolphins from the ferry on the way back, which was awesome! We might go back to The Big Time Out in the future, depending on the line-up (and the weather forecast), but our shade-sharing neighbour also gave us lots of tips about other small festivals she's been to around BC that are apparently much better. There's a jazz / world music festival in Kaslo (a nine hour drive from Vancouver) where the stage floats on a lake, and the crowd can wade in the lake up to their waists while listening.
Watch this space... Summer 2011... maybe!
Thursday, August 12, 2010
TMA: Too Many Acronyms
My Computer files and email inbox are awash, overflowing, drowning in the acronyms used by various funding agencies, academic institutes, media outlets, and assorted other organisations.
I'm sure many of my readers have the same issue. However, my problem is Compounded by working on (mainly) Breast Cancer in British Columbia, Canada - with American, British, and Canadian Collaborators. So the same letters tend to occur over and over:
R is always for research and H is always for Health, for which I suppose I should be grateful.
Put any of these letters together in any Combination, and I probably have a matching folder somewhere.
Let's see, I have folders for the following: AACR, ACRI, BCCA, BCCRC, BCCF, CBC, CBCF, CBCRA, CCSRI, CFI, CIHR, CRUK, GBC, NCE, NCI, NCIC, NIH, NSERC, and OICR.
So today, Checking my Credit Card Balance online, I was Confused to see a payment to an entity Called BCF.
Very Confused.
Was there a new player in town? The British Columbia Foundation? The Breast Cancer Fund? The Broadcasting Centre Foundation? British Central Fund? Boring Christmas Food? Burgeoning Cat Fur? Big Chaotic Frenzy? Bring Cath Fudge?
And why the Bloody Cockeyed Fuck am I giving them money??!!
Until I realised the item was related to our upcoming trip to Vancouver Island.
A trip that necessitates paying a reservation fee to BC Ferries.
I think I need to get out more.
I'm sure many of my readers have the same issue. However, my problem is Compounded by working on (mainly) Breast Cancer in British Columbia, Canada - with American, British, and Canadian Collaborators. So the same letters tend to occur over and over:
- A is for Agency, Alberta, Alliance, America, American, or Association
- B is for Breast, British, or Broadcasting
- C is for Canada, Canadian, Cancer, Center, Centre, Centres, Collaborative, Columbia, Consortium, Corporation, or Council
- F is for Foundation or Fund
- I is for Innovation, Institute, or Institutes
- N is for National or Network
- S is for Science or Society
R is always for research and H is always for Health, for which I suppose I should be grateful.
Put any of these letters together in any Combination, and I probably have a matching folder somewhere.
Let's see, I have folders for the following: AACR, ACRI, BCCA, BCCRC, BCCF, CBC, CBCF, CBCRA, CCSRI, CFI, CIHR, CRUK, GBC, NCE, NCI, NCIC, NIH, NSERC, and OICR.
So today, Checking my Credit Card Balance online, I was Confused to see a payment to an entity Called BCF.
Very Confused.
Was there a new player in town? The British Columbia Foundation? The Breast Cancer Fund? The Broadcasting Centre Foundation? British Central Fund? Boring Christmas Food? Burgeoning Cat Fur? Big Chaotic Frenzy? Bring Cath Fudge?
And why the Bloody Cockeyed Fuck am I giving them money??!!
Until I realised the item was related to our upcoming trip to Vancouver Island.
A trip that necessitates paying a reservation fee to BC Ferries.
I think I need to get out more.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Next-generation paranoia
I'm back from my trip with more photos than I can reasonably fit into a blog post, so please bear with me while I attempt to cull the collection! Until then, it's enough to say that it was an amazing experience that proved once again that there is simply nowhere else I'd rather be than the BC coast in summer.
Luckily, I have plenty of post ideas that don't require any agonising decisions over which photos to ditch. Here's one about a dream I had the night before we launched.
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In my dream, I was on one of my twice-annual trips to San Diego to meet with collaborators. As always, I was part of a group from my institute that consisted of four or five PIs plus me, and after an interesting first day of meetings, our wonderful hosts had taken us out for a wine-soaked dinner on a sunny patio. One of the senior hosts had brought a friend, but forgot to introduce him to the group. The friend told a distinctly unfunny joke... and then got in my face angrily demanding to know why I hadn't laughed. When I replied that I was sorry but I just didn't think the joke was all that funny, he yelled "WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA???!!!", tipped my chair backwards, threw a bag over my head, and man-handled me into a vehicle. I could hear everyone at our table loudly protesting and saying they were going to call the cops, and my assailant shouting "I'm the head of the fucking CIA! Call the fucking cops, they won't do nothing!!!!"
I was taken to a tiny, dark cell filled with people, had the bag roughly pulled off my head, and was told that I would rot in jail. I had all my belongings taken from me* and was not allowed to call my husband, my boss, or the Canadian (or British) embassy.
My cellmates asked what had happened, and when I told them they said "DUDE!!! You always laugh at the head of the CIA's jokes!"
After a long and scary night, and then many hours of waiting the following day, I was finally summoned from the cell and told I was free to go. The desk staff were clearly embarrassed, and one female officer apologised for her boss's drunken temper tantrum as she handed me back my belongings. "He's just an ass", she explained helpfully, and called me a cab.
I asked the cab driver to take me to our collaborators' facility, where I found the second day of meetings in full flow, with one of our PIs in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation and people excitedly asking lots of questions. Everyone looked round as I entered, and someone said "oh good, they let you go then?"
"Why the fuck didn't you come and get me??!!" I demanded, not unreasonably given the circumstances.
"Sorry Cath", said one of our PIs. "We were going to, but the conversation about our latest next-gen sequencing results just got soooo interesting! Look at this slide, this is a totally novel finding!"
Cue me waking up, equal parts disturbed and amused.
The moral of this story?
It's wonderful to have colleagues who are passionate about their work. Really, it is - it's one of the main perks of my job.
However, if you're so completely dedicated to your research that you make your colleagues have paranoid dreams about you letting them rot in a jail cell rather than disrupt your conversation about your latest results, maybe it's time to ease up a little, eh?**
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*the list under "contents of purse" included "iPhone". Under "contents of iPhone", I wrote "life". This dream was clearly trying to tell me many, many different things.
**none of my colleagues would ever actually do this for real. I don't think. I guess it depends on which project they're discussing.
Luckily, I have plenty of post ideas that don't require any agonising decisions over which photos to ditch. Here's one about a dream I had the night before we launched.
--------
In my dream, I was on one of my twice-annual trips to San Diego to meet with collaborators. As always, I was part of a group from my institute that consisted of four or five PIs plus me, and after an interesting first day of meetings, our wonderful hosts had taken us out for a wine-soaked dinner on a sunny patio. One of the senior hosts had brought a friend, but forgot to introduce him to the group. The friend told a distinctly unfunny joke... and then got in my face angrily demanding to know why I hadn't laughed. When I replied that I was sorry but I just didn't think the joke was all that funny, he yelled "WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA???!!!", tipped my chair backwards, threw a bag over my head, and man-handled me into a vehicle. I could hear everyone at our table loudly protesting and saying they were going to call the cops, and my assailant shouting "I'm the head of the fucking CIA! Call the fucking cops, they won't do nothing!!!!"
I was taken to a tiny, dark cell filled with people, had the bag roughly pulled off my head, and was told that I would rot in jail. I had all my belongings taken from me* and was not allowed to call my husband, my boss, or the Canadian (or British) embassy.
My cellmates asked what had happened, and when I told them they said "DUDE!!! You always laugh at the head of the CIA's jokes!"
After a long and scary night, and then many hours of waiting the following day, I was finally summoned from the cell and told I was free to go. The desk staff were clearly embarrassed, and one female officer apologised for her boss's drunken temper tantrum as she handed me back my belongings. "He's just an ass", she explained helpfully, and called me a cab.
I asked the cab driver to take me to our collaborators' facility, where I found the second day of meetings in full flow, with one of our PIs in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation and people excitedly asking lots of questions. Everyone looked round as I entered, and someone said "oh good, they let you go then?"
"Why the fuck didn't you come and get me??!!" I demanded, not unreasonably given the circumstances.
"Sorry Cath", said one of our PIs. "We were going to, but the conversation about our latest next-gen sequencing results just got soooo interesting! Look at this slide, this is a totally novel finding!"
Cue me waking up, equal parts disturbed and amused.
The moral of this story?
It's wonderful to have colleagues who are passionate about their work. Really, it is - it's one of the main perks of my job.
However, if you're so completely dedicated to your research that you make your colleagues have paranoid dreams about you letting them rot in a jail cell rather than disrupt your conversation about your latest results, maybe it's time to ease up a little, eh?**
--------
*the list under "contents of purse" included "iPhone". Under "contents of iPhone", I wrote "life". This dream was clearly trying to tell me many, many different things.
**none of my colleagues would ever actually do this for real. I don't think. I guess it depends on which project they're discussing.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Sound as a pound
Right, we've got charts, a compass, tide tables, two Swiss Army knives, bear spray, and an air horn*, and we're off on an adventure! (Well, we're actually off to my mother-in-law's today, which isn't all that adventurous, even when our nephews are there, which they are. The adventure starts tomorrow morning).
If anyone needs me I'll beon a horse in a kayak, somewhere in Desolation Sound (so called because Captain Vancouver saw it on a bad day. Apparently it's beautiful and not at all desolate - at least not in summer).
Oh, and our tenant's still going to be around, so don't even think about breaking into our house while we're away! He's a seriously big dude (6 foot 7 and built like a brick shithouse) who's bodyguarded for Jean Claude van Damme and Vin Diesel, among others. He's loaned us his bear spray; he often comes across bears in the course of his (non bodyguarding) work duties, but they run away from him. Seriously. He has an example of this kind of interaction caught on a tape from a work security camera, but I'm not allowed to post it.
He's the big one in this photo - and bear (hah!) in mind that none of the other three guys is exactly petite.
He's also a fantastic cat sitter, and the kitties love him.
BTW, expect (slightly) more science blogging than you've been used to when I get back! (Don't worry, you can skip the science posts if you're not interested. Same goes for any other kind of post, obviously, although I assume that every single reader is riveted by the ongoing dental floss conversation).
------------------
*Conversation while reserving kayaks:
Me: "is there much bear activity up there at the moment?"
Woman in kayak shop: "there's one on the lawn right now! It's looking at me through the window!"
Me: "..."
Hence the bear spray and air horn.
If anyone needs me I'll be
Oh, and our tenant's still going to be around, so don't even think about breaking into our house while we're away! He's a seriously big dude (6 foot 7 and built like a brick shithouse) who's bodyguarded for Jean Claude van Damme and Vin Diesel, among others. He's loaned us his bear spray; he often comes across bears in the course of his (non bodyguarding) work duties, but they run away from him. Seriously. He has an example of this kind of interaction caught on a tape from a work security camera, but I'm not allowed to post it.
He's the big one in this photo - and bear (hah!) in mind that none of the other three guys is exactly petite.
Left to right: Mr E Man, my Dad, our massive tenant, baby Lilah's Dad
He's also a fantastic cat sitter, and the kitties love him.
BTW, expect (slightly) more science blogging than you've been used to when I get back! (Don't worry, you can skip the science posts if you're not interested. Same goes for any other kind of post, obviously, although I assume that every single reader is riveted by the ongoing dental floss conversation).
------------------
*Conversation while reserving kayaks:
Me: "is there much bear activity up there at the moment?"
Woman in kayak shop: "there's one on the lawn right now! It's looking at me through the window!"
Me: "..."
Hence the bear spray and air horn.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Steepness in Seattle
Treebeard was wrong:
going South does NOT feel like going downhill.
(Well, except for the bits that actually were downhill. But some of those bits were really hard, too).
But let's start at the beginning...
(BTW this is a really long post. And those of you who donated will have already received an abbreviated version by email, edited and sanitised for the sake of my parents and assorted other relatives. So feel free to skip to the video at the end).
DAY ONE
My friends showed up at my house at 5:30 am on Saturday, put my bike on their bike rack, and drove me to the start of the ride in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. As we got closer we saw more and more cars with bikes on them, and by the time we reached the parking lot, there must have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of bike within sight. We loaded our bags onto a truck, ate a little food, covered ourselves in Chamois Butt'r, and tried to find constructive uses for all our nervous energy. In my case this mostly meant chattering like a monkey and checking that I had my passport about once every five minutes as we waited for the 7:00 am opening ceremonies. The crowds built up around us, and after the arrival of some Mounties carrying a Canadian flag and the singing of O Canada, we learned from the first speaker that there were more than 2,200 riders, and that between us we'd already raised more than 9.2 million dollars!*
The speeches were short and to the point (although a little bit too Bravehearty for my taste in parts - there was a bagpipe sound track and everything), and off we went! It was a slow and wobbly start as 2,200 riders tried to squeeze through the official start gate, but we were soon pedalling smoothly on the closed-off roads (with the exception of the poor soul I saw fixing a puncture within ten minutes of the start). As expected, I lost my faster, fitter, better-bike-owning friends (who were sprinting for the border to avoid the line-ups) within a couple of minutes, but I was happy enough to go at my own pace and enjoy the atmosphere as riders chatted to each other and supporters waved signs and cheered and rang cow bells and blew vuvuzelas from the side of the road.
The first 28 km to the border went by quickly, although the head wind that hit us on a nice long gentle down hill section was a bit of a bugger; I hate that disconnect where your eyes and brain go "wheeeeee! Down hill! Yay! Let's go!", but your legs go "whyyyyyyy is this sooooooo haaaaaaard????". I also quickly realised that I had omitted something crucial from my training: steep downhill rides! I grew up in an extremely flat place and literally never went up or down a hill on a bike until I was 22. Steepness and speed are very scary things for me, especially when surrounded and being passed by so many other people (almost all of my training was done solo).
The border itself was the only organisational weak spot on the whole ride. People like my friends who got there early went straight through, but by the time I got there the official queue area was full, and people were forming a wide, ragged, and basically stationary line behind the official area. I stood in this line for over 15 minutes before the DJ announced that anyone not already in the official queue area was supposed to have been given a coloured sticker, and they'd call everyone up by colour so we didn't have to stand in line for so long. It then took me 5 minutes to find someone giving out stickers (pink). As I was sitting down 15-20 minutes later, I saw someone else handing out red and orange stickers; those were the first colours called, with pink following quite a bit later. The DJ's tune choices didn't help much - as he played "Born in the USA", people around me started singing "We're not in the USA, not in the USA", and the follow up ("Highway to the Danger Zone") was an even worse choice. At least it was sunny, with lots of food and drink on offer! Once I was in the official line it moved quite quickly and I was through and into Washington State with a minimum of fuss. And waiting so long at the border left me with fresh legs for the remaining 101 km of the first day.
The next bit of the ride was gorgeous - so much nicer than blazing down the I5 like we usually do when we drive to Seattle. It turns out that Blaine is a really nice little town, and lots of the locals came out to cheer us on. We then went through a gorgeous State park by the ocean, and through some really pretty countryside, although the head wind came back with a vengeance at times. The first real hill of the day was in Bellingham, but it wasn't any worse than any of my training hills, and there were lots of stops at red lights that offered short recovery periods. Once through the town there was a very gradual but very, very long hill up to the lake where we had lunch - again, that disconnect between your brain seeing a nice flat road and your legs dying a slow death on the hill! As I said to a fellow rider, "this hill sucks. If you're going to be a hard hill to climb, you could at least have the decency to actually look like a hill. This hill is just mean". (This may have been the beginning of the "incoherent ramblings" stage that lasted for most of the rest of the ride).
Sitting down at lunch time was niiiiice. The lakeside setting was lovely, and the lunch was tasty and full of carbs. There was another section of the long gradual hill immediately after lunch - not fun on a full stomach - but that was essentially the end of the climbing for the day.
The probable shooting incident happened with about 35 km still to go. We'd just passed an interesting section of road, featuring a gun range and a huge speedway with hundreds of people camping by the side of the road, and I was essentially riding by myself** down a hill being a bit wussy and scared by the steepness and the speed. There were quite a few vehicles on the road, and many of them weren't giving us much space (it was one of the few sections of road with no shoulder or bike lane at all), so I wasn't entirely happy to hear another one approaching from behind. Then, just before the vehicle entered my field of vision, there was an almighty sharp BANG!!!!!!!. I was startled and jumped a bit, but didn't lose control of my bike, and the vehicle (a gunmetal grey pickup with no license plate on the back) came blazing past me. I didn't see the source of the noise, but my first thought was "OMG GUN!!!!", because that's totally what it sounded like. I was already thinking "or maybe his engine backfired, although that's really unlikely when going down a big hill, or maybe he did it on purpose, although I don't even know if that's possible, or maybe..." when another cyclist came up alongside me from behind. She said "oh my god OH MY GOD, are you OK???!!!" I said that I was, and she said "that was REALLY. FUCKING. SCARY", but then she rode off ahead of me before I could ask her what she'd seen that had freaked her out so much.
I still wasn't sure what had happened, but then at camp that night a colleague told me that he'd seen someone at the gun range testing out a scope on a rifle by looking down it at a long line of riders in a really scary way. And then - the clincher - a volunteer who'd been riding one of the escort motorbikes told me the next morning that another rider had been hit with a pellet gun on the same stretch of road, and they'd had various reports of guns seen and shots fired (from vehicles and from the side of the road). So I think someone almost certainly fired a gun, either at me or into the air behind me. Either that or they launched a firework at me, although I didn't smell a firework, and that's hardly any better than being shot at, anyway. Several drivers on this section of road also apparently shouted "GO HOME!" (or ruder variations thereof) at riders and volunteers. Nice, eh?
Given that I wasn't sure what had happened at the time, I actually wasn't that traumatised. There was an incident towards the end of the next day that scared me much, much more - coming down a steep hill in the rain and needing to make a left turn off the main road halfway down the hill, I got totally freaked out by my speed and hit my brakes quite hard. I was freezing cold and exhausted at this point and not making terribly good decisions, so I didn't think to look behind me before I braked, and the car behind me (that I hadn't heard) almost hit me - there was a screeching of brakes and tyres and a swerve and a lingering smell of burning rubber. Mostly my fault (I'm really sorry, dude, whoever you are - I'm sure I scared the bejeezus out of you), although I'd say he/she was maybe a little too close behind me (again, no shoulder or bike lane). I had to pull off the road and wait a few minutes before I could calm down enough to continue.
Anyway, I'm still supposed to be describing day one. After surviving the putative shooting incident there were a couple more downhill sections and then the rest of the ride was flat. It was painful, though, and not helped by what I'm sure was some inaccurate distance marking. I seemed to get from the 110 km to the 120 km mark really quickly, but then the final (alleged) 9 km into camp took for-bloody-ever. I think the 120 km distance sign was accidentally put up at around the 115 km mark, and a few other riders I talked to agreed, because the last hour was just awful. The road was also quite rough in texture, which didn't help the sore hands, wrists, and other parts, and the added friction made us pedal harder than if we were on a smooth road. This part of the ride was purely about survival, and I have to say that when I finally turned the last corner just before 4:00 pm and saw the Mount Vernon camp site and the welcoming committee of cheering volunteers, I almost cried with gratitude!
CAMP
Camp was great! I grabbed my bag, set up my sleeping gear, had a lovely lovely hot shower, found my friends, ate some tasty if slightly lukewarm food, and drank some free beer. I ran into a few other people I know, and got one of my colleagues to do a bit to camera about how the money from the ride benefits his research (see video at the end of the post). I love how PIs can snap into this mode at a moment's notice, and then snap straight back into "normal guy drinking beer and shooting the breeze" mode just as quickly. It was great to get everyone else's perspective on the ride (and, if I'm honest, nice to see so many people arriving well after me. I'd been worried about being one of the slowest riders after seeing all the amazing bikes people had, and indeed most of my friends and colleagues finished 2-3 hours ahead of me on both days, but I passed loads of people on some really high-end bikes, while people on fat tyre mountain bikes passed me several times).
There were speeches, clips of the day's media coverage, and then two bands - the first one good, the second one fabulous. We went off to bed at 9:30 pm, looking forward to a really good sleep before the second day's ride.
Unfortunately...
Some idiots decided that the best way to prepare for the second day was to get wasted and whoop and holler and run around. It went on for ages. The security guards were trying to make them go to bed, but they were unsuccessful, and the sounds of rowdiness carried all over the campsite. I hate that maybe 5 or 6 people got to decide that hundreds of other people shouldn't get any sleep; this has happened at every music festival I've ever been to, but I really wasn't expecting it on the ride. However, I love that some of them apparently ended up throwing up and passing out drunk - ride 120 km on THAT, mofos! (I'm assuming they were riders. If they were non-riding volunteers, I'm even more pissed off that they kept everyone up). They finally shut up at around midnight... just in time for a train to come by the camp site, blowing its horn for what seemed like full minutes at a time. At this point the only people getting any sleep at all were the loudest snorers in camp; my tent mate and I were awake almost all night, getting maybe an hour of sleep, two max, in short ten minute bursts, until another train came through at 4:45 am and everyone around us apparently said "screw it" and started talking and rustling their bags as they got up and started packing.
The early start had its benefits, though - we were pretty much first in line for the excellent cooked breakfast (although the coffee sucked and the tea was barely even yellow after steeping the bag for two minutes - hotter water next time, please, guys!). By the time we'd put our bags back on the truck and gone to retrieve our bikes, the line was huuuuge and hundreds of people were still waiting for breakfast when we were allowed to start riding shortly after 7:00 am.
DAY TWO
Once again we started the day in a town, with the roads closed by the police and people riding four or more abreast. In contrast to the previous day's sun and cloud mix, we started with a fine misty drizzle that didn't even warrant a waterproof jacket and actually felt quite refreshing. I was amused to see a humongous queue of riders at the first coffee stand we passed - apparently lots of other people were unimpressed by the caffeinated options at camp!
The route was nicer this second day, with much of it on off-road bike trails through the woods. It was heavenly to be away from the traffic; this relief completely mitigated the increasingly heavy rain fall...
... at least for a while.
By the time I got to lunch I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. I'd put on my waterproof jacket as soon as the drizzle turned to rain, but the elements defeated anything that I (or any of the other riders) could throw at them. There was some cover at the lunch site, but it was all taken up by other soaked riders, so I sat on a cold, wet, wooden bench and ate my cold lunch and drank my cold drinks out in the open, with my sandwich getting more and more soggy with rain. I was shivering at this point, and would have given anything for a hot (or even a warm) drink - but there was only water and Gatorade. I got out of there as fast as I could, only noticing as I left the lunch site that they were handing out those metallic emergency blankets you see at the end of marathons. Too late for me, I was on my way and didn't want to stop moving!
Now, I'd been told at camp by several people (including someone who shall remain nameless but who one would expect to have accurate inside information) that there were "no hills after lunch!!! Downhill all the way!!!". When I got onto the first hill after lunch I was so grateful for the (relative) warmth provided by the extra exertion that I didn't think much of it...
...but then the hill just did.
not.
stop.
It was hard. Really hard. Really, really, hard. We'd seen hardly any supporters that day, just one or two people honking horns or waving from cars, and the one group who did brave the rain to stand and wave signs and cheer us on literally had me in tears of gratitude. I was miserable. I kept thinking of why I was doing the ride, and reminding myself that whatever I was feeling was nowhere near as bad as the cancer treatments my friends and relatives have been through. This helped - quite a lot, actually - but I was still suffering.
This part is all a bit of a blur; long slogs up hills, occasionally steep enough to force me off my bike for a few hundred metres of walking, followed by short and terrifying downhill sections (this is where I made the aforementioned mistake and almost got hit by a car), followed by turning corners to see yet another massive climb ahead. My phone rang a couple of times during this stage, but I knew I couldn't get to it in time to answer, and that I couldn't pick up my voicemail or even see who was calling without turning on the prohibitively expensive data roaming option; this only served to piss me off more. I followed Mermaid's advice of eating something if I started to feel pissed off, but it really didn't help at all (and this was within an hour of eating lunch), and I started to think that exhaustion / hypothermia / near-death experiences / PMS were viable alternative hypotheses.
At one point, turning yet another bloody corner to see yet another bloody hill, I said loudly "OH FUCK. RIGHT. OFF, you bastard hill", and the rider ahead of me started giggling. This really seemed to lift my mood, and everything after that point seemed easier to deal with, even though the long climbs and steep terrifying descents and pouring rain were much the same as before.
At the final pit stop, I called Mr E Man and my good friend from high school who lives close to the end of the ride. Hearing their voices was an amazing boost to my spirits, even though my friend said she wouldn't be able to see me cross the line because her baby was just starting his nap. I learned that my friends had finished the ride and that one of them was waiting for me with his wife and baby Morgan, and that there was beer and hot food and dry clothes, with only 15 km of very pleasant, flat, smooth, off-road riverside bike trail standing in my way. At this point it stopped raining and I jumped on my bike for the final time, still soaked, still freezing, but no longer miserable!
The last section was a pure pleasure. Everyone was so excited to be near the end, and there was much chatter and laughter and discussion of whether we should have a beer first or a hot drink first. And then, at about 2:45 pm, I saw a sign for Marymoor park - the end of the ride - 1.5 miles away! The joy! The euphoria! The hooting and hollering among the riders!
There were people lining the whole of the rest of the route, cheering and yelling and waving signs. Coming into the park, I could hear the music and the announcer... getting louder and louder... and then I turned the final corner and saw a field full of people... and then I was in a muddy field and crossing the line and people on my right were yelling "CATH! CATH! CATH!"
I have honestly never been so happy in my life to see my husband and friends. I'll spare you the over-emotional details, but there were hugs and tears aplenty, and not just from me.
The beer was so delicious. The food was so yummy. And the atmosphere was so amazing. But we were soooo cold (you'll see me moving from side to side in the video below - I didn't need the loo, I was just trying to generate some warmth and also stretch my muscles out a bit). When we got to our nearby hotel I had a long hot shower, but as soon as I got out, I started shivering again. So I got in the hot tub, but when I got out after 5 minutes to go and grab my camera, I started shivering again. I didn't feel properly warm for about another half hour, but by that time I'd had a couple of beers and was incredibly happy, so it didn't really seem to matter all that much any more. And then I got to have dinner with my hubby, my Vancouver friends, and my high school friend! And then fall asleep about ten minutes after we got back to our room!
Muscle-wise, I felt better than I'd expected. Much better, actually. My quads were pretty tight, but I was fine as long as I kept moving. Stopping was bad, though - I could barely get out of my chair after dinner on Sunday, and the next day was rather painful, especially when I first got up and then again when I got out of the car after the drive home. (It was depressing how quickly we blasted through all the landmarks from the ride - the lunch site, the campsite, the first day's lunch site, the border. It's really not far at all in a car!). Back home, I woke up at about 4 am on Tuesday with all kinds of weird back spasms going on, but that problem fixed itself with an almighty CLICK during a meeting later that day, and on Thursday morning I was back on my bike. My regular commute felt so short, and I stormed up the hills like they weren't even there - but where were all the people cheering me on, and welcoming me into the bike room with signs and pom poms and vuvuzelas?!
My arse still hurts a bit, but that'll pass soon enough.
Overall, it was an amazingly positive experience. I'm immensely glad I did it***, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who donated and/or supported me in any other way.
I maded you guys a video! (With some beer in it!)
And then I drinked it! (The beer, not the video!)
THANK YOU, EVERYONE!
YOU ROCK!
Video: Part I (I sure wish YouTube would have told me the original all-in-one version was too long before it spent 21 minutes saying "uploading"):
Part II:
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*I got some more donations after the ride started, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so the total will be higher by now!
**having just passed one group of cyclists, and on my way to catching up with the next one (yes, I passed people! Quite a lot of people! Although lots of groups were passing me, too). This was my pattern for most of the ride. I think my speed fell somewhere between the average for the recreational riders and the average for the actual good cyclists. Or something
***I'm also immensely glad it's over! It's been hanging over me for months, and the training combined with 7 weeks of hosting friends and family over the last 2.5 months means that I feel like I've had no time to myself, literally since the Olympics. I haven't had time to get a hair cut, or buy new clothes to replace the ones that are literally falling apart on me - I'm a shaggy-headed, scruffy-clothed ragamuffin! But this weekend I get to do whatever I want! Like, watch every single World Cup game! COME ON ENGLAND!!!
going South does NOT feel like going downhill.
(Well, except for the bits that actually were downhill. But some of those bits were really hard, too).
But let's start at the beginning...
(BTW this is a really long post. And those of you who donated will have already received an abbreviated version by email, edited and sanitised for the sake of my parents and assorted other relatives. So feel free to skip to the video at the end).
DAY ONE
My friends showed up at my house at 5:30 am on Saturday, put my bike on their bike rack, and drove me to the start of the ride in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. As we got closer we saw more and more cars with bikes on them, and by the time we reached the parking lot, there must have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of bike within sight. We loaded our bags onto a truck, ate a little food, covered ourselves in Chamois Butt'r, and tried to find constructive uses for all our nervous energy. In my case this mostly meant chattering like a monkey and checking that I had my passport about once every five minutes as we waited for the 7:00 am opening ceremonies. The crowds built up around us, and after the arrival of some Mounties carrying a Canadian flag and the singing of O Canada, we learned from the first speaker that there were more than 2,200 riders, and that between us we'd already raised more than 9.2 million dollars!*
The speeches were short and to the point (although a little bit too Bravehearty for my taste in parts - there was a bagpipe sound track and everything), and off we went! It was a slow and wobbly start as 2,200 riders tried to squeeze through the official start gate, but we were soon pedalling smoothly on the closed-off roads (with the exception of the poor soul I saw fixing a puncture within ten minutes of the start). As expected, I lost my faster, fitter, better-bike-owning friends (who were sprinting for the border to avoid the line-ups) within a couple of minutes, but I was happy enough to go at my own pace and enjoy the atmosphere as riders chatted to each other and supporters waved signs and cheered and rang cow bells and blew vuvuzelas from the side of the road.
The first 28 km to the border went by quickly, although the head wind that hit us on a nice long gentle down hill section was a bit of a bugger; I hate that disconnect where your eyes and brain go "wheeeeee! Down hill! Yay! Let's go!", but your legs go "whyyyyyyy is this sooooooo haaaaaaard????". I also quickly realised that I had omitted something crucial from my training: steep downhill rides! I grew up in an extremely flat place and literally never went up or down a hill on a bike until I was 22. Steepness and speed are very scary things for me, especially when surrounded and being passed by so many other people (almost all of my training was done solo).
The border itself was the only organisational weak spot on the whole ride. People like my friends who got there early went straight through, but by the time I got there the official queue area was full, and people were forming a wide, ragged, and basically stationary line behind the official area. I stood in this line for over 15 minutes before the DJ announced that anyone not already in the official queue area was supposed to have been given a coloured sticker, and they'd call everyone up by colour so we didn't have to stand in line for so long. It then took me 5 minutes to find someone giving out stickers (pink). As I was sitting down 15-20 minutes later, I saw someone else handing out red and orange stickers; those were the first colours called, with pink following quite a bit later. The DJ's tune choices didn't help much - as he played "Born in the USA", people around me started singing "We're not in the USA, not in the USA", and the follow up ("Highway to the Danger Zone") was an even worse choice. At least it was sunny, with lots of food and drink on offer! Once I was in the official line it moved quite quickly and I was through and into Washington State with a minimum of fuss. And waiting so long at the border left me with fresh legs for the remaining 101 km of the first day.
The next bit of the ride was gorgeous - so much nicer than blazing down the I5 like we usually do when we drive to Seattle. It turns out that Blaine is a really nice little town, and lots of the locals came out to cheer us on. We then went through a gorgeous State park by the ocean, and through some really pretty countryside, although the head wind came back with a vengeance at times. The first real hill of the day was in Bellingham, but it wasn't any worse than any of my training hills, and there were lots of stops at red lights that offered short recovery periods. Once through the town there was a very gradual but very, very long hill up to the lake where we had lunch - again, that disconnect between your brain seeing a nice flat road and your legs dying a slow death on the hill! As I said to a fellow rider, "this hill sucks. If you're going to be a hard hill to climb, you could at least have the decency to actually look like a hill. This hill is just mean". (This may have been the beginning of the "incoherent ramblings" stage that lasted for most of the rest of the ride).
Sitting down at lunch time was niiiiice. The lakeside setting was lovely, and the lunch was tasty and full of carbs. There was another section of the long gradual hill immediately after lunch - not fun on a full stomach - but that was essentially the end of the climbing for the day.
The probable shooting incident happened with about 35 km still to go. We'd just passed an interesting section of road, featuring a gun range and a huge speedway with hundreds of people camping by the side of the road, and I was essentially riding by myself** down a hill being a bit wussy and scared by the steepness and the speed. There were quite a few vehicles on the road, and many of them weren't giving us much space (it was one of the few sections of road with no shoulder or bike lane at all), so I wasn't entirely happy to hear another one approaching from behind. Then, just before the vehicle entered my field of vision, there was an almighty sharp BANG!!!!!!!. I was startled and jumped a bit, but didn't lose control of my bike, and the vehicle (a gunmetal grey pickup with no license plate on the back) came blazing past me. I didn't see the source of the noise, but my first thought was "OMG GUN!!!!", because that's totally what it sounded like. I was already thinking "or maybe his engine backfired, although that's really unlikely when going down a big hill, or maybe he did it on purpose, although I don't even know if that's possible, or maybe..." when another cyclist came up alongside me from behind. She said "oh my god OH MY GOD, are you OK???!!!" I said that I was, and she said "that was REALLY. FUCKING. SCARY", but then she rode off ahead of me before I could ask her what she'd seen that had freaked her out so much.
I still wasn't sure what had happened, but then at camp that night a colleague told me that he'd seen someone at the gun range testing out a scope on a rifle by looking down it at a long line of riders in a really scary way. And then - the clincher - a volunteer who'd been riding one of the escort motorbikes told me the next morning that another rider had been hit with a pellet gun on the same stretch of road, and they'd had various reports of guns seen and shots fired (from vehicles and from the side of the road). So I think someone almost certainly fired a gun, either at me or into the air behind me. Either that or they launched a firework at me, although I didn't smell a firework, and that's hardly any better than being shot at, anyway. Several drivers on this section of road also apparently shouted "GO HOME!" (or ruder variations thereof) at riders and volunteers. Nice, eh?
Given that I wasn't sure what had happened at the time, I actually wasn't that traumatised. There was an incident towards the end of the next day that scared me much, much more - coming down a steep hill in the rain and needing to make a left turn off the main road halfway down the hill, I got totally freaked out by my speed and hit my brakes quite hard. I was freezing cold and exhausted at this point and not making terribly good decisions, so I didn't think to look behind me before I braked, and the car behind me (that I hadn't heard) almost hit me - there was a screeching of brakes and tyres and a swerve and a lingering smell of burning rubber. Mostly my fault (I'm really sorry, dude, whoever you are - I'm sure I scared the bejeezus out of you), although I'd say he/she was maybe a little too close behind me (again, no shoulder or bike lane). I had to pull off the road and wait a few minutes before I could calm down enough to continue.
Anyway, I'm still supposed to be describing day one. After surviving the putative shooting incident there were a couple more downhill sections and then the rest of the ride was flat. It was painful, though, and not helped by what I'm sure was some inaccurate distance marking. I seemed to get from the 110 km to the 120 km mark really quickly, but then the final (alleged) 9 km into camp took for-bloody-ever. I think the 120 km distance sign was accidentally put up at around the 115 km mark, and a few other riders I talked to agreed, because the last hour was just awful. The road was also quite rough in texture, which didn't help the sore hands, wrists, and other parts, and the added friction made us pedal harder than if we were on a smooth road. This part of the ride was purely about survival, and I have to say that when I finally turned the last corner just before 4:00 pm and saw the Mount Vernon camp site and the welcoming committee of cheering volunteers, I almost cried with gratitude!
CAMP
Camp was great! I grabbed my bag, set up my sleeping gear, had a lovely lovely hot shower, found my friends, ate some tasty if slightly lukewarm food, and drank some free beer. I ran into a few other people I know, and got one of my colleagues to do a bit to camera about how the money from the ride benefits his research (see video at the end of the post). I love how PIs can snap into this mode at a moment's notice, and then snap straight back into "normal guy drinking beer and shooting the breeze" mode just as quickly. It was great to get everyone else's perspective on the ride (and, if I'm honest, nice to see so many people arriving well after me. I'd been worried about being one of the slowest riders after seeing all the amazing bikes people had, and indeed most of my friends and colleagues finished 2-3 hours ahead of me on both days, but I passed loads of people on some really high-end bikes, while people on fat tyre mountain bikes passed me several times).
There were speeches, clips of the day's media coverage, and then two bands - the first one good, the second one fabulous. We went off to bed at 9:30 pm, looking forward to a really good sleep before the second day's ride.
Unfortunately...
Some idiots decided that the best way to prepare for the second day was to get wasted and whoop and holler and run around. It went on for ages. The security guards were trying to make them go to bed, but they were unsuccessful, and the sounds of rowdiness carried all over the campsite. I hate that maybe 5 or 6 people got to decide that hundreds of other people shouldn't get any sleep; this has happened at every music festival I've ever been to, but I really wasn't expecting it on the ride. However, I love that some of them apparently ended up throwing up and passing out drunk - ride 120 km on THAT, mofos! (I'm assuming they were riders. If they were non-riding volunteers, I'm even more pissed off that they kept everyone up). They finally shut up at around midnight... just in time for a train to come by the camp site, blowing its horn for what seemed like full minutes at a time. At this point the only people getting any sleep at all were the loudest snorers in camp; my tent mate and I were awake almost all night, getting maybe an hour of sleep, two max, in short ten minute bursts, until another train came through at 4:45 am and everyone around us apparently said "screw it" and started talking and rustling their bags as they got up and started packing.
The early start had its benefits, though - we were pretty much first in line for the excellent cooked breakfast (although the coffee sucked and the tea was barely even yellow after steeping the bag for two minutes - hotter water next time, please, guys!). By the time we'd put our bags back on the truck and gone to retrieve our bikes, the line was huuuuge and hundreds of people were still waiting for breakfast when we were allowed to start riding shortly after 7:00 am.
DAY TWO
Once again we started the day in a town, with the roads closed by the police and people riding four or more abreast. In contrast to the previous day's sun and cloud mix, we started with a fine misty drizzle that didn't even warrant a waterproof jacket and actually felt quite refreshing. I was amused to see a humongous queue of riders at the first coffee stand we passed - apparently lots of other people were unimpressed by the caffeinated options at camp!
The route was nicer this second day, with much of it on off-road bike trails through the woods. It was heavenly to be away from the traffic; this relief completely mitigated the increasingly heavy rain fall...
... at least for a while.
By the time I got to lunch I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. I'd put on my waterproof jacket as soon as the drizzle turned to rain, but the elements defeated anything that I (or any of the other riders) could throw at them. There was some cover at the lunch site, but it was all taken up by other soaked riders, so I sat on a cold, wet, wooden bench and ate my cold lunch and drank my cold drinks out in the open, with my sandwich getting more and more soggy with rain. I was shivering at this point, and would have given anything for a hot (or even a warm) drink - but there was only water and Gatorade. I got out of there as fast as I could, only noticing as I left the lunch site that they were handing out those metallic emergency blankets you see at the end of marathons. Too late for me, I was on my way and didn't want to stop moving!
Now, I'd been told at camp by several people (including someone who shall remain nameless but who one would expect to have accurate inside information) that there were "no hills after lunch!!! Downhill all the way!!!". When I got onto the first hill after lunch I was so grateful for the (relative) warmth provided by the extra exertion that I didn't think much of it...
...but then the hill just did.
not.
stop.
It was hard. Really hard. Really, really, hard. We'd seen hardly any supporters that day, just one or two people honking horns or waving from cars, and the one group who did brave the rain to stand and wave signs and cheer us on literally had me in tears of gratitude. I was miserable. I kept thinking of why I was doing the ride, and reminding myself that whatever I was feeling was nowhere near as bad as the cancer treatments my friends and relatives have been through. This helped - quite a lot, actually - but I was still suffering.
This part is all a bit of a blur; long slogs up hills, occasionally steep enough to force me off my bike for a few hundred metres of walking, followed by short and terrifying downhill sections (this is where I made the aforementioned mistake and almost got hit by a car), followed by turning corners to see yet another massive climb ahead. My phone rang a couple of times during this stage, but I knew I couldn't get to it in time to answer, and that I couldn't pick up my voicemail or even see who was calling without turning on the prohibitively expensive data roaming option; this only served to piss me off more. I followed Mermaid's advice of eating something if I started to feel pissed off, but it really didn't help at all (and this was within an hour of eating lunch), and I started to think that exhaustion / hypothermia / near-death experiences / PMS were viable alternative hypotheses.
At one point, turning yet another bloody corner to see yet another bloody hill, I said loudly "OH FUCK. RIGHT. OFF, you bastard hill", and the rider ahead of me started giggling. This really seemed to lift my mood, and everything after that point seemed easier to deal with, even though the long climbs and steep terrifying descents and pouring rain were much the same as before.
At the final pit stop, I called Mr E Man and my good friend from high school who lives close to the end of the ride. Hearing their voices was an amazing boost to my spirits, even though my friend said she wouldn't be able to see me cross the line because her baby was just starting his nap. I learned that my friends had finished the ride and that one of them was waiting for me with his wife and baby Morgan, and that there was beer and hot food and dry clothes, with only 15 km of very pleasant, flat, smooth, off-road riverside bike trail standing in my way. At this point it stopped raining and I jumped on my bike for the final time, still soaked, still freezing, but no longer miserable!
The last section was a pure pleasure. Everyone was so excited to be near the end, and there was much chatter and laughter and discussion of whether we should have a beer first or a hot drink first. And then, at about 2:45 pm, I saw a sign for Marymoor park - the end of the ride - 1.5 miles away! The joy! The euphoria! The hooting and hollering among the riders!
There were people lining the whole of the rest of the route, cheering and yelling and waving signs. Coming into the park, I could hear the music and the announcer... getting louder and louder... and then I turned the final corner and saw a field full of people... and then I was in a muddy field and crossing the line and people on my right were yelling "CATH! CATH! CATH!"
I have honestly never been so happy in my life to see my husband and friends. I'll spare you the over-emotional details, but there were hugs and tears aplenty, and not just from me.
The beer was so delicious. The food was so yummy. And the atmosphere was so amazing. But we were soooo cold (you'll see me moving from side to side in the video below - I didn't need the loo, I was just trying to generate some warmth and also stretch my muscles out a bit). When we got to our nearby hotel I had a long hot shower, but as soon as I got out, I started shivering again. So I got in the hot tub, but when I got out after 5 minutes to go and grab my camera, I started shivering again. I didn't feel properly warm for about another half hour, but by that time I'd had a couple of beers and was incredibly happy, so it didn't really seem to matter all that much any more. And then I got to have dinner with my hubby, my Vancouver friends, and my high school friend! And then fall asleep about ten minutes after we got back to our room!
Muscle-wise, I felt better than I'd expected. Much better, actually. My quads were pretty tight, but I was fine as long as I kept moving. Stopping was bad, though - I could barely get out of my chair after dinner on Sunday, and the next day was rather painful, especially when I first got up and then again when I got out of the car after the drive home. (It was depressing how quickly we blasted through all the landmarks from the ride - the lunch site, the campsite, the first day's lunch site, the border. It's really not far at all in a car!). Back home, I woke up at about 4 am on Tuesday with all kinds of weird back spasms going on, but that problem fixed itself with an almighty CLICK during a meeting later that day, and on Thursday morning I was back on my bike. My regular commute felt so short, and I stormed up the hills like they weren't even there - but where were all the people cheering me on, and welcoming me into the bike room with signs and pom poms and vuvuzelas?!
My arse still hurts a bit, but that'll pass soon enough.
Overall, it was an amazingly positive experience. I'm immensely glad I did it***, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who donated and/or supported me in any other way.
I maded you guys a video! (With some beer in it!)
And then I drinked it! (The beer, not the video!)
THANK YOU, EVERYONE!
YOU ROCK!
Video: Part I (I sure wish YouTube would have told me the original all-in-one version was too long before it spent 21 minutes saying "uploading"):
Part II:
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*I got some more donations after the ride started, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so the total will be higher by now!
**having just passed one group of cyclists, and on my way to catching up with the next one (yes, I passed people! Quite a lot of people! Although lots of groups were passing me, too). This was my pattern for most of the ride. I think my speed fell somewhere between the average for the recreational riders and the average for the actual good cyclists. Or something
***I'm also immensely glad it's over! It's been hanging over me for months, and the training combined with 7 weeks of hosting friends and family over the last 2.5 months means that I feel like I've had no time to myself, literally since the Olympics. I haven't had time to get a hair cut, or buy new clothes to replace the ones that are literally falling apart on me - I'm a shaggy-headed, scruffy-clothed ragamuffin! But this weekend I get to do whatever I want! Like, watch every single World Cup game! COME ON ENGLAND!!!
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