Canadian Thanksgiving

This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving. I spent the weekend in Victoria and Vancouver celebrating with friends and family.

I spent my first 3 years in Seattle riding the Clipper almost once a month. That meant many Saturday mornings of waking up before 6am to make it down to the pier for the 8am departure. When Matt moved to Toronto I honestly thought that I would never step foot on the Clipper again. Turns out I was wrong. On Friday morning I took the Victoria Clipper up to Victoria to meet Matt who had flown in from Ontario on Thursday. We spent Friday afternoon hiking Mount Work and Friday evening having dinner with some of Matt’s law school friends. We actually had a full scale Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and stuffing and all.

On Saturday I did my 7 mile long run and we spent the rest of the day relaxing at our friends’ place. Then we boarded a seaplane and took a 35 minute harbour to harbour flight to Vancouver. It was nice and clear so the views from the plane were amazing. Once in Vancouver we met my parents and sister for dinner downtown and then we went to a performance of Delirium by Cirque du Soleil. It was quite different from the Cirque performance I saw in Ottawa which was stagged in their own tent. This performance was held in GM Place (where the Canucks play) and was a much bigger scale production. It was more about the music and less about the acts but it was still really enjoyable. Plus there were no embarrassing audience participation acts.

On Sunday Matt and I woke up bright and early so that we could meet David and drive up to North Vancouver to climb the Grouse Grind. David had been planning on brining at least one of his 11 month old twins but because of the rain they had to stay home. I’ve wanted to do the Grind since I moved out west so I was pretty excited to be there. It’s 853m of elevation along a 2.9km trail. It ended up taking us just over an hour to get to the top. It was certainly not easy but it was a lot of fun.

Then we drove back into the city and got some of Vancouver’s best coffee at Caffe Artigiano. Best. Latte. Ever. From there we went to visit more friends and out to a sushi lunch. Yum. Then it was back to Allison’s place for Thanksgiving dinner with the Cottons. We watched all 6 episodes of season 1 of Slings & Arrows on DVD. It is seriously the funniest thing I have seen on television in a very very long time.

Monday was pretty lazy. We slept in, had pancakes with Nutella for brunch and hung out at Alli’s place. Then Dad and I drove Matt to the airport and we spent the rest of the afternoon reading knitting patterns, discussing Christmas travel plans and watching Slings & Arrows again! Mom, Dad and I drove back to Seattle last night and now it’s back to the usual pace of school and work.

I wish every weekend were Thanksgiving.