Trip to Vancouver and Seattle - Day 1

This year's big vacation is a trip to Vancouver and Seattle. We left Saturday, August 9th. Unfortunately our flight out of Oakland was delayed due to fog/rain in Seattle. Since we hadn't seen rain in California literally for months and we're in the midst of a drought, that actually sounded pretty good. We arrived in Seattle and picked up our car, and headed north toward Vancouver. We actually drove through some rain so I got to exercise the wipers, which felt a little novel due to the lack of rain in California! Traffic in Seattle was predictably bad. We also got caught on I-5 outside of Seattle due to an overturned RV. Not only did it block traffic, but apparently the sewage tank exploded, resulting in a pretty awful smell!! Once we got through that delay, we headed up north and stopped in the last town in Washington before Canada, Blaine, the home of the Peace Arch. We bought wine and beer and some snacks for our room and then headed across the border. The border crossing was easy, although the Canadian immigration guy did ask us a bunch of questions. We then drove up to New Westminster, a suburb of Vancouver where we had booked a room in a hotel called the Met. It's fair to say that New Westminster has character. It's a very small town on the quay of the Fraser river. It possibly has the highest concentration of bridal shops I have ever seen. Our hotel, the Met, was built in 1891. The room was nice, but the kitchenette that we booked turned out to be a refrigerator and microwave. Given the age of the building, there was obviously no exercise room! The location was pretty perfect though, right next to the Skytrain that goes into Vancouver. We wandered around New Westminster, checking out the Casino boat (at least from the outside) and various restaurants, finally settling on eating at the Heritage bar and grill, which featured live music by a local group called Fretworks. Aisling especially enjoyed their rendition of "Summertime" by Porgy & Bess. After dinner we headed to the local internet cafe/map store where Aisling and Gordon checked myspace and I bought a map of Vancouver. We went back to our room, which turned out to overlook both the Skytrain station and the beergarden for the hotel bar, which was pretty lively, since it was a Saturday night. We got a good sense of how effective the Skytrain is; a train seemed to be stopping literally every two minutes. Even with all the noise, though, we slept really well after the long day traveling.