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Our Journey Around the World: Part 14 - Vancouver, BC


The course in Pitt Meadows came together pretty quick. Kristen, our host really did manage to pull everything together in the shortest time ever, which also meant we had to get all of our stuff together rather quickly as well.

We arrived at the airport and started our drive to Surrey where we were staying… which apparently was bad… but we will tell you that story after. So we drove. And drove. And drove. And the traffic!  My goodness the traffic! Usually we can get our bearings within a couple of days, but this time, we never got ahold of it. We never even managed to play any tunes in the car as we were far to focused on what the gps was telling us to do. Speaking of the gps. This was it’s last trip. After a couple more mystery tours as a result of this thing, we will be hosting a “GPS is going in the garbage”party shortly upon our return. The traffic was unreal! And if you have read our past blogs, you will know how Carolyn feels about this. This was more of the high stress driving than we really prefer.

However the train didn’t really work out for us either. We went into Vancouver one night to have dinner with Kari’s son-in-law Mark and decided that a train would be way easier. And on the way there it was! Beautiful! We had a seat on the train, managed to get off at the right stop, it was easy!  Dinner was fantastic with great company and we even made a few new friends while we were out and about. We thought we would try to look for some outfits for Karsyn's upcoming wedding while we were in Vancouver. After about three stores we realized that we are really terrible at shopping and gave up to have a nice relaxing beverage in Milestones. Plus it was raining. So that was another excuse not to dress shop.

After dinner we made it back to the train station at about 9pm and the place was packed! It was like rush hour had hit all over again! So we stood on the way back which was very very long, but managed to make it to the final stop. To which we got off the train and thought… well this doesn’t look familiar. Well that was because it wasn’t! We programmed in this Surrey station into the GPS, so that is where we assumed that we had gone to, however, the GPS had LIED ONCE AGAIN and taken us to a different station! So now there we were, in the dark, realizing that we are now totally lost and don’t actually know which station our car is at.

Now throughout the time we had already spent in Pitt Meadows, people had given us funny looks or asked “why” we were staying in Surrey, and we were about to find out why. As we were lost, we saw some lovely police men who we told that we were completely lost. The beautiful police officer helped us and once we eventually figured out to look at our parking receipt to figure out which station we were at and actually took us to our station to make sure we didn’t get lost again. We told him we were staying in Surrey. From this he went on a very long tangent about how we SHOULD NOT be staying there.  How dangerous it is with the drugs and beatings and murders etc. Basically he scared the crap out of us a little. Up to that point we really hadn’t seen anything wrong in Surrey (nor did we our entire stay). So after our enlightening conversation we had to walk across a very dark and very long parking lot to get back to our car. We walked quickly and kept keys in between our fingers to make sure we were armed. The walk was completely uneventful.

Overall, BC was beautiful! Beautiful people, beautiful landscape and AMAZING horses who we fell in love with. We truly do have the best job ever! Except traffic. We hate that.

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