Okay, technically speaking, I suppose my car needs a shortsholder:
With all apologies to fans of pre-modern linear narrative, popular demand* dictates that I cover the last part of our excellent vacation first. But I have to start with our second trip to Colorado, so that means starting the tale west of Vancouver on Salt Spring Island at 5 AM PDT.
* - Then again, perhaps this is a bad idea, as popular demand - read, a request from Sprawl-baller Aaron H. - also dictated that I include another sexy "half-naked pic" of your balladeer. This order is by-letter filled by the shorts pic above - I am indeed shirtless up there, it being a cool 102 degrees at the time of photo-shooting - but I am sure that is not what he had in mind, so here's a zoom-out to fulfill Harczynskian desires. FYI, this is what a one-fifth naked Harczynskian looks like when chugging a 32 ounce girly beverage:
The bed and breakfast where we stayed, Blackberry Glen, was easily a five star experience, but one question stood between the establishment and the coveted fifth and a half star - how would they handle breakfast on Friday morning? For flight-out-of-Seattle-at-3:45 and ill-timed-ferry-schedule reasons, we had to leave at about 5:30 that A.M. This meant not only an ugly 5 A.M wake up, but also that that we would not be getting our last breakfast, rendering the last night a mere bed-and. Jason and John, our excellent hosts, came through in the clutch with a quasi-picnic breakfast of sandwiches and fruit, pushing the stay into exalted territory. Seriously, I cannot recommend Salt Spring or Blackberry Glen enough, though I suppose we'll get into that in another post.
So Beck and I lumbered downstairs in the dawn-dark with our week's worth of luggage to begin a Friday-ful of travel, being careful not to make noise so as not to disturb our hosts nor the friendly neighborhood deer. We managed to successfully not take a detour into America en route to the Canadian ferry this time,* as thankfully it was just about a one mile - sorry, 1.6 km - ride to the ferry port from the B&B. We waited about twenty minutes before pulling up onto the ferry, parking the car and heading to the passenger deck. We used the boat cafeteria's microwave to heat up our breakfasts-to-go. And they were SO GOOD, on all kinds of aesthetic levels:
* - We were in a huge rush on Tuesday, leaving from Vancouver to get to the ferry in Tsawwassen - our boat left at 7:10, we were supposed to be there half an hour early, and our ETA after hitting traffic in Vancouver was approximately 6:38. Our directions said "take 17 South to the ferry," but as we're heading down that road, Beck sees a sign that says "next left: Tsawwassen." So, reasonably enough, she turns left. And after speeding through downtown Tsawwassen in approximately two minutes, we see signs welcoming us to America. I'll spare you the goofy details of Port Roberts, other than to note that yes, U.S.A. has perhaps the most pointless patch of territory in the world up there on a little peninsular offshoot of Canada, and the border guards on that patch are not really huge fans of the border U-turn. We technically left Canada for a microsecond, so we had to re-present passports, re-answer all of the questions about cargo and weapons, and restate our purpose in Canada. The guard waved us through with all the passion of someone who has heard "which way back to the ferry?" a thousand times, and we made it at 6:50, the last people in line to be let on the boats. Phew.
You'll notice, in addition to the sandwiches and fruit and breakfast chocolates, the chocolate-chip-oatmeal-and-raisin cookies that made it into the mix there. Those were definitely a highlight of the Blackberry Glen experience, and no, how dare you accuse us, we did not eat all two dozen of the ones baked for us. That's preposterous!
The ferry ride was relatively uneventful, other than fog and boat-rocking that made us a little queasy, but nothing crazy. I spent the boat trip (inbetween five minute naps, anyways) reading Tango et al.'s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, at which Beck gave a cursory glance and asked, "Is that a book for nerds?" Yes. Really, really cool nerds. I did, though, just to stay remotely on topic, give quite a bit of thought to leveraging situations with playing time and how it applied to Ultimate. So that sort of reset my bar for assigning PT for the weekend, and I think resulted in a more even, more successful distribution. So the nerdiness occasionally pays off.
We couldn't take the subtle indoor boat-rocking after a bit, so we got up and walked laps around the boat-deck for the last fifteen minutes of the ride. This is more challenging than perhaps it sounds - being exhausted and walking across a rocking boat effectively makes you look very drunk, so that was good exercise for the day. We pulled in to Tsawwassen at 9:30-ish with way more than enough time to make the 2 hour drive to Seattle and catch our plane. We started making plans to hit a good eatery somewhere en route accordingly. Which would have been great...
...except that we did not anticipate that it was the Friday before "BC Day." Apparently Canada has a "civic holiday," which seems to mean that someone along the line decided screw it, the whole country's going to take a day off the first weekend in August. How very uncapitalist of them. The result was that we were not the only ones making the trip from Vancouver to Seattle that afternoon, and our leisurely stroll to Seattle turned into a tight-scheduled pain in the arse. We spent an hour and fifteen minutes in a traffic stall at the U.S.-Canada border, and the most challenging aspect of crossing the border this time was when the guard asked "What's new from Canada?" and Beck thought he was asking about Vancouver news and not, say, the bottle of port we bought on Salt Spring Island. "Nothing much... what's new with you?" didn't really suffice as an answer. But we didn't mention the Sky Tower or going to a Phish concert*, so they let us through just fine.
* - This has been a Zil shoutout. Liz: the only person who's U.S. - Canadian border crossings are more eventful than Beck's.
Another idiotic feature of your narrator is that he completely neglected to comprehend that Canada is, indeed, a foreign country, and as such data and texting and phone calls in such a place are, however technically, international. Meaning 15 bucks per megabyte and such. So we made it a solid three days without using our iPhones, and thank goodness we got them back when we did. The primary effect was that we could use the Yelp! app to find a non-McDonalds eatery for the ride back - despite the newfound tightness of our schedule, we thought it'd be a great idea to stop just off the highway in Everett for another nice vacation lunch*. We tried to stop at a place called The Majestic Cafe only to find it closed, but that sent us across the street to The Prohibition Grille... and next time someone asks you, "Do they have good soul food in Everett, WA?," you can answer, "Yes, yes they do." If I recall correctly, Beck got a bisque and a salad, and I got a big-as-my-head order of cornbread followed by a plate of Andouille sausage and cajun shrimp over jalapeno cheese grits and spinach. Dios mio - probably didn't exactly qualify as pre-Ultimate carbo-loading, but it certainly fulfilled my pre-tourney "dripping with oily flavor goodness" quota. The food came out fast and got us back on the road in a split; if you're ever north of Seattle, that place will not disappoint.
* - We ate quite well this vacation, I tell you what. I am pretty sure Beck broke a mussels-meal record - special thanks to Meghan and Greg for sneaky funding part of our trip! The Salt Spring Island bucks were great.
So we slugged it down through Seattle Friday afternoon traffic and our flight hour got closer and closer. Much to Beck's chagrin, the signs for rental car return at the airport left out one significant fact - that Thrifty's rental car location was five miles south of all the others. ARGH! All told, it all worked out, but it injected the end of an already too long 10 hour day with an added drama that we didn't need. A ten hour day, and we hadn't even taken the trip back to Denver yet. Ugh. So a tired Nyet* and Beck boarded the plane to Colorado, pretty much wanting a bed to crash into at that moment but needing another four or five hours to realize it. Beck fortunately had rented Sherlock Holmes for her iPad - her ire for Steve Jobs being worth a discussion on its own - and I had my nerd book to tide me over, so we made it through the flight okay.
* - I should note - the fatigue thing certainly did not get any better over the vacation. I was up and down all week - e.g., danced like a maniac at Elliot's wedding, did elliptical workouts twice in Denver the previous weekend and went running twice at the island, but at other times couldn't walk around downtown Vancouver without feeling faint, had to eat every five seconds to feel remotely okay, etc. I continue to not be able to get it. I was at my nadir around Wednesday or so and had absolutely no designs on playing at Colorado Cup ... but as we'll see, the best laid plans of Nyet and men are, you know, not life. Or something.
Oh, somewhere in there, EBay and Cole each texted me that Cole had broken his leg. And Ian wrote to tell me that his knee felt terrible. And I already knew that Dheintime wasn't going to be making the weekend. And with myself being questionable, it certainly seemed like we were in for a rough time. I was sub-enthused.
We had to circle Denver a few times in the plane thanks to thunderstorms - so at that point, I was having a "fatigue attack," for lack of a better term, and envisioning a weekend in the rain watching a depleted Sprawl squad play in nasty conditions. Not exactly the height of my optimism. We landed and it seemed every plane in the place had been delayed - tons of people were already in line at Hertz; thankfully we had reserved the car (priceline HEYO - 50 bucks total for the weekend!) and could just use the kiosk. We eschewed dinner in favor of a stop at a Safeway and ended up grabbing turkey and some fruit; we drove to the hotel (located partway between Denver and Boulder) and got ready to crash. I talked to Ian for approximately five seconds to get the keycard to our room and otherwise saw no Sprawlers that night. I got my stuff ready for the morning, briefly watched part of a Cubs-Rockies game which the local-to-Denver teaming won 17-2, and headed to bed.
So Friday night was a low - tired after daylong travel, wondering how in hell I was going to rally to play for the weekend, and generally not feeling great about the cap to our vacation. I would be pleasantly surprised in the ensuing 48 hours.
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