Houston means I'm one step closer to you

We stopped at a rest stop to "rest" and find a cache. While Connor and I were finding the cache, Richard and Andrew found a beaver-chewed log. Almost like it had been turned on a lathe.


I think Andrew has a future as a wildlife photographer. His flower shots are pretty good.




Houston!


Houston is home to the world's largest fly rod.


Bringing it in.


Naturally, there's a cache at the world's largest fly rod.

Is it in here? (no)


The cache!


The thinker on a millstone from Mexico, in Houston, BC.


Now we are 120km from Alaska. The road is closed north of our turnoff due to wildfires, but we will be just fine. We've booked 2 nights here in New Hazelton and will go to Alaska this morning and come back tonight.

The view from our hotel window.


And there's a playground just across the quiet street!

Vancouver to Quesnel

Long drive today, but so pretty. We took the Sea to Sky Highway north of Vancouver. It follows an inlet and then goes through the mountains to Squamish and Whistler. They had what I think were the Indian names of Squamish and Whistler on road signs. They were very strange and had numbers in the middle of the names.

The road through the mountains was steep and twisty. There were sheer cliffs.


Mountains


More mountains. The temperature changed from 70 to 85 in the valley to 62 in the mountains.


We are in a minivan with three rows of seating. The middle row was in the floor, until Connor wanted to move up. So we stopped at a nice spot with a short walk to the river, and Rich and Connor moved the stuff and changed the seats. Andrew and I walked to the river, which was very shallow. Didn't take the camera, though. Here he is at the same spot I took the previous picture.


The smoke from the wildfires was getting bad when we left the mountains. It got a lot worse, which is why I don't have pictures after the mountains. Well, the scenery wasn't all that spectacular, too. You can sort of see the smoke here.


We followed this stream for miles and miles.


The stream we had been crossing and recrossing finally met the Fraser River. The big river was muddy, and you could really see how the faster, clearer river fed into it. And you can really see the smoke now.


Now we're at a nice motel, Rich is out for a beer in the bar, Andrew is making a latch hook tie dye peace sign, Connor is watching cartoons, and I'm fixing to plan our route tomorrow. We made such good time today, we might end up getting closer than we thought to Alaska tomorrow. Oh! And we're north of 50 degrees! And we found an earthcache!

Leaving Vancouver

We're leaving this morning, the conference is over, I bought way more than our allowed 5 pounds of books, might need to buy a new suitcase to haul them home! The boys bought a new camera because we left ours at home. My phone takes pretty good pictures, but not on the run or in the dark. So anyway, here are some more pictures of Vancouver.

One day, we had lunch at the Teahouse in Stanley Park. It was really good. Here is dessert. Richard had pistachio creme brulee, with peach ice cream. I had a vanilla bean pavlova.


The convention center is on the water. There were seaplanes taking off and landing all day long. There is the Chevron station that you probably remember from the Olympics.


The boys went to the aquarium in Stanley Park. There was a 4D movie about the ocean. They missed the 10:30 SpongeBob movie but this one was good. What makes it 4D? It's an ordinary 3D movie with special effects from the seats, like puffs of air and spray when the whales come on, and things that poke you (gently) when the snakes come on. Reminded me of the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids attraction at Disney World. They also had a cool tank that the kids could go into via a bubble.


Aren't these gorgeous?


I could not live here.


The kids found a water park.


And an iguana.


The boys went for a final walk down the waterfront. Here's the Vancouver Convention Center in the distance. They grow grass on the roof.


The giant Lego orca by day. It's not really made of Legos.


A cool picture of the orca reflected in the window. They didn't know it, but I was at a talk (on the Statistics Without Borders recent efforts in Haiti) just on the other side of those windows.


The boys keep trying to take the art home. This one was called The Drop.


We went for one last drive around Stanley Park. Here are the totem poles.


Lots of statues, plaques, and monuments (and a virtual cache named that as well). You can also once again see how amazingly urban Vancouver is. That's a lot of people, all living in those highrises.


We are looking forward to getting out into the countryside. North to Alaska!

Baseball

How come every time we go on vacation, the Astros get on a streak? Ok, not every time, but in 2005 I missed the last 10 weeks of the season, watching the division clinching game on Australian TV the morning we left to come back to the States. I didn't buy a data plan in Canada, so I can't see this 7 game win streak they are on. And tonight's guaranteed win on Astros Wins-day.

Vancouver

Vancouver is urban. Extremely urban. There are very tall apartment buildings every which way you look. The streets are filled with pedestrians, bike riders, cars, and taxis. The people are tourists and locals, young and old, strange and stranger.

Our hotel is on the east side of downtown Vancouver. We have a great view of BC Place, where the skating events were held, from the deck on the 16th floor. (there's a foosball table up there also, which is what the kids like) Out of our window on the 4th floor, we have a view of high rise apartment buildings.

I'm used to Houston, and to some extent Austin, where people work downtown and live outside of downtown. Vancouver seems to be the opposite. The tall buildings all seem to be living space.

We took a drive around Stanley Park and some of the downtown area today. I'll be at the conference through Wednesday, so this will probably be the last post until then. Here are some pictures of what we saw.

BC Place


Stuck in traffic. The sign says "Welcome to Vancouver A Nuclear Weapons Free Zone."


My phone is not the best at taking night pictures. Here are the boys in front of one of the Olympic torches, all lit up.

The Trifecta, part trois

We did it! We drove 10 miles from Sandy to the Original Stash Cache this morning and it was a nice easy find. The NZ cacher we met yesterday at Groundspeak HQ drove up while we were logging the cache. He's also going to Vancouver, but he's not a statistician.

The plaque.


We decided to find a final cache in Portland instead of heading to GC12, one of the oldest caches still in existence. It was totally worth it. I can't say anything about it here, but we were laughing and talking about it all the way to Vancouver.

Then we hightailed it to Vancouver, making it to dinner with friends right on time. We checked into our hotel and look who was waiting for us!

The Trifecta, part deux

The Best Western Inn in Sandy, OR, has very comfortable beds.

After completing the first leg of the trifecta, we drove to Seattle and made it to the coordinates with a half hour to spare. This was good, because we (well, ok, just the grown-ups) were stiff from the morning's hike and it was nice to not have to hurry.

Rich at the entrance way.


I wonder where we are going?


The boys in front of the treasure chest of travel bugs!


That was the last picture I took inside. We had a 2pm appointment. When we got there, there must have been about 5 or 6 different caching groups there already! Lots of people, all talking the same language. Ok, both literally (English) and figuratively (caching). We met a cacher from NZ (he had his All Blacks shirt on, it was pretty obvious where he was from) who made the HQ cache his #1000. He told us there were a pair of Aussie women there, and we met them later on. They are Aussies living in Britain, we are Aussies living in Texas, so we had a good chat about dual citizenship and how the US doesn't quite get it. Luckily for us, Australia does. We got the number of the big travel bug in the shot above.

Earlier in the week, Eric from Groundspeak had written asking if we would do a Lost and Found story on our search for the trifecta. I had told him they were welcome to tag along, that we'd be finding all three legs on Friday. He found someone else to follow to the APE cache, but filmed us at HQ and interviewed Richard for the story. Rich did a bang-up job. And then we got a Lackey geocoin! This is a coin which is only given to a select few, and can't be bought. Yay! It was a terrific cap to a terrific visit.

We bought travel bug tags and a couple of small Signal (their mascot) "dolls" (don't tell the boys I called them that!) for the boys. Connor says he doesn't like geocaching, but he does like Signal.

Our seats on the plane were one in row 18 and three in row 29. Andrew got the one by himself. The people next to him told him about the "sky needle" so he was especially excited when we went right by it, intentionally, on the way back to I-5. I have a vague memory of eating dinner in a revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. I hope it's real.

You wonder what part of Seattle you're in now.


Austin traffic is worse than Seattle traffic, but Austin is smaller, so Austin traffic is better than Seattle traffic. We crawled along the I-5 towards Portland, through Tacoma and Olympia. We stopped at an IHOP for supper because we realized we never had lunch and maybe that was the reason we were all getting grouchy. It didn't help the traffic any, and we are sorely hoping it won't be that bad going back north to Vancouver.

We were too tired to get the final leg last night, so we stopped at a nice motel, but we'll find it today, and we'll have found the three legs within a 24 hour period, and that's all good too.

The Trifecta

First of all, we haven't finished it yet.

Secondly, those mountains we saw from the plane yesterday were Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier.

We started out this morning to find the A.P.E. cache. The parking lot had one car in it when we got there. We went up the Annette Lake trail at Snoqualmie Pass.


We didn't bring our llamas.


Pretty mountain stream. I bet the water was cold.


Gorgeous trail, but it was steep for a mile. Walking a mile or two in the Texas noontime heat is much easier. We budgeted for this, though, and rested a lot, and made it out just about on time.


Stunning views on the way to the cache made it easier.


We made it!


Ok, I'm tired. More tomorrow.

Travelling to Seattle

We're in Seattle! It's almost midnight Austin time! The sun's still up!

Here's the view from the airplane window right before we landed. We saw this big mountain from the ground, too. I think we're going around it tomorrow or Saturday. I think Mt. Rainier is in the foreground and Mt. Hood is in the background. These used to be volcanoes.

Summer Trip

This summer, JSM is held in Vancouver, BC. Naturally, we'll get some caching in. Here's our itinerary:

July 29 - fly to Seattle
July 30 - find APE cache, visit Groundspeak headquarters, find original stash plaque cache. In geocaching circles, this is called "the trifecta" and we're going to try to do it all in one day.
July 31 - drive to Vancouver and have dinner with stat friends
Aug 1-5 - JSM. The boys will go to the aquarium and explore the area. I'll be happily stuck in technical sessions, committee meetings, and evening mixers with people who speak my language.
Aug 6-9 - explore BC and Alaska. There is a road which goes to Alaska, into a town, then immediately back into Canada. There is one cache in that town. We're going to find it.
Aug 9-14 - vacation rental house in Golden, BC. This house is about an hour from Lake Louise, 2 hours from Banff, 3 hours from Jasper. 5 days in the Canadian Rockies - could be worse.
Aug 14 - drive to Seattle
Aug 15 - fly back to Austin

Here it is, 3619 miles, according to Google.