Our Odyssey
A week ago last Thursday we bought a new car. We're old enough to understand that on Vancouver Island public transit is really not a viable option. We now own a very fun Fiat 500e electric car. It's fast, very entertaining, has real buttons for essential tasks, and will run about 225 km on a full charge.
For 98% of life that's entirely adequate. We can plug it into a wall outlet and "fill it up" for $2-3 - roughly the price of one litre of regular gasoline these days.
We're house hunting around Duncan, and have fallen in love with Maple Bay. Even better, housing prices are about half what you would pay in Vancouver, and have been falling day to day for quite a while.
Three days before buying our Fiat we arrived in Vancouver at around dinner time. Of course our bodies were still 8 hours ahead, on UK time. We've adapted, but wow did it make car shopping exciting.
We have learned that Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal is under some kind of reconstruction that means we could't get a realistic time to travel from there, so we wound up loading up in Tsawwassen, and arriving in Departure Bay. The quality of Ferries' "White Spot" food has declined significantly, matched only by the utter desolation of our Air BnB home in Vancouver for three days.
We're now into a string of Trusted Housesitters gigs, where we take care of people's pets in exchange for staying in their homes. First we were up in Duncan, now we're in Langford, a suburb of Victoria, then back up to Duncan. Somewhere in here we have a week still open between August 26th and September 10th - if you've got room in Vancouver especially, let me know. Then we've got nearly another month in another Duncan home, with another Duncan pet.
Our flight from England was with IcelandAir. With WestJet on the verge of a strike by flight attendants it felt worth spending a little bit more to be secure. We liked IcelandAir, but found out too late that they would have let us spend two days in Reykjavík with no extra charges for airfare. If it wasn't for the string of other things already booked in Vancouver we would have jumped at the chance.
Flying from Europe to Vancouver via IcelandAir means changing planes at the Keflavík International Airport. That is an experience all on its own. You arrive upstairs, and it's all quiet and modern. Then you are directed down the escalator to the Departures level, which is jammed with hundreds of people. Because there are almost no chairs, most are sitting on the floor. The "leaving EU airspace" security check is slow and odd. Our quick snack was a hotdog, though other options were available. And the washrooms... despite being a very new terminal, they were largely inoperable.
Then we boarded.
Despite such oddities I'll encourage anyone travelling to Europe to go by IcelandAir. You'll pay a little more for the polar route that you travel, and the flight is longer, but make sure that you get a window seat.
There were icebergs below us, white and green depending on how the sun caught them.
And then there was Greenland.
It will take your breath away.
Just to document it, here was our itinerary two Mondays ago:
5 am - catch a taxi from Wolfson College in Cambridge with way too much baggage.
Taxi drops us off at the National Express bus stop in town, for the trip to Heathrow.
At Heathrow we boarded the first IcelandAir plane.
At Keflavík International Airport we de-planed, ate a hotdog, and boarded our second IcelandAir plane.
We arrived at YVR in Vancouver around 6 pm - 2 am England time.
Shuttle to YVR South Terminal (who knew?) to pick up the rental car.
Arrive at our AirBnb (after picking up groceries) at some time that neither of us really can remember.
Ultimately it was a 24 hour journey. And by the weekend we were in Duncan, in our new car, meeting the first pair of pets that we were to care for.
Despite what you may have heard on the Internet, Emily Watson is not about to set our Odyssey into iambic pentameter...
