Construction

Vancouver is a very beautiful city, but like any other, it has its grey areas and I have driven around many of them today.

Both Richmond and Vancouver currently have areas of road construction because of the 2010 Olympics. The main cause of this is the building of the new Canada line to complement the existing skytrain lines. I'm getting the hang of Vancouver - well, to a certain extent, so that I can now drive somewhere and feel that the chances are even if I get lost, I will be able to find my way out again, and I proved this twice today.

One of my errands was to drive almost into the downtown core to pick up hockey tickets from GM place. This was a task that I would have happily dumped onto Kevin, but alas, they had to be picked up during the day before 17.00 so it fell to me. Yes of course I got hopelessly lost, I didn't follow my google map religiously, one false move and I was into a hideous and completely unknown one-way system. But GM place is huge, by keeping it in my radar I finally found it and a nice Indian man let me park in the not-really-open-to-the-public underground car park.

Now I was a bit full of myself. Kevin had told me I could easily get out of the East of the City to Coquitlam where I have to collect my UK Driving Licence. How foolish, not only did I find myself heading further into Vancouver for a short while, but when I did sort myself out I just never quite found the other City.

Surely the car could find its own way to Superstore though? Sure enough, no problem at all, but then getting out, suddenly the road I normally turn down is blocked. Roadworks, construction, confused drivers, but hey, I'm one of them now, I have the ability to leap tall buildings in my little red car, ok, not quite, but yeah, the finding my way out thing - it worked.

On the final stretch, no longer lost nor delayed by anything other than traffic lights I looked up and three passenger planes, low in the sky, were approaching the airport. The lights were all I could see against the backdrop of the twilight, one behind the other, the first slightly lower in the sky than the second and that slightly lower than the third. Each one no doubt carrying people from afar who are loved by other people who are near, or bringing people back to this wonderful city.