Month: July 2008

Final thoughts about our trip

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

  • Pictures of our trip are finally in a Flickr set. I uploaded the 30 I liked the best. Somehow we managed not to take any pictures in Vancouver…I guess we were too busy drinking and cycling.
  • Speaking of drinking, up until the last evening (when we were all about Belgian) we managed to drink only BC wine & beer for the entire trip. Some favourites: the Mt. Begbie Tall Timber Ale, several Mark James microbrews, the Blasted Church Hatfield’s Fuse and the Sumac Rudge Meritage.
  • Google Maps puts the trip from Calgary to Vancouver at just over 1,000 km; including side trips we covered just under 1,200 km. We filled the gas tank of our brand new Toyota Corolla once, in Revelstoke, at a cost of $50. We pre-paid the fuel option on the car for $60 (so worth it…I would’ve paid more than that to fill it up since I brought the car in right at E, and I didn’t have to drive around downtown Vancouver looking for a gas station) so ultimately we paid just $110 for all that driving. Not bad, considering all the griping I hear from drivers these days.
  • Animals spotted: a bear (from the safety of the Whistler gondola), marmots, hares, several gophers / prairie dogs / Richardson’s Ground Squirrels / whatever they were, chipmunks, a pika, an elk & a few big-horned sheep crossing the Trans Canada.
  • The flight attendant I spoke to on the Toronto–>Calgary flight told me about her brother’s blog, where she said he talked about “weird” music. I was trying to describe to her what I usually listened to, and she said it sounded like what her brother wrote about. She gave me the name of his blog. I checked it out…yup. She was definitely in the right ballpark. Check out Everything is Pop.

So…where to next?

[tags]mt. begbie brewery, mark james group, blasted church, sumac ridge, toyota corolla, everything is pop[/tags]

Hoteliers: fear my web 2.0 wrath

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Random catch-up from the last week, including some highlights of the thousands of feed items I just blazed through:

.:.

George Carlin died last Sunday. I had no idea. That’s what happens when you’re out of tv/internet/newspaper range for 4 days. Carlin was an important entertainer, a rare animal indeed. Jessica Hagy from Indexed puts it nicely:

.:.

I watched three movies on our trip, mainly on the flights from and to Toronto: Charlie Wilson’s War (which I never did finish…our descent began before I caught the end, but I don’t feel like I missed that much), Ocean’s 13 (yawn…the last two have just been issues of GQ magazine put to celluloid) and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (and you shall know it by its bleak, bleak trail of dead…yeesh). Philip Seymour Hoffman was the best thing about the last, and the only good thing about the first. If that guy had “leading man good looks” he’d be a superstar. I suspect in about ten years he’ll be regarded as one of the finest actors of our generation, if not the finest.

.:.

Richard Florida pointed to the chart below, by Dave Lakeland, showing the cost of gas vs. the GDP per capita (all in the US) for the past twenty years. Very interesting.

.:.

I actually quite look forward to this phase of a trip, where we can finally see how all the pictures look (Nellie’s 22″ iMac gives a much clearer idea than my tiny little sub-laptop) and I can write reviews of the hotels in TripAdvisor. Three of the hotels will be getting rave reviews; one will get faint praise and one mild scorn. Mmmmmm, feedback.

[tags]george carlin, indexed, richard florida, cost of commuting, tripadvisor[/tags]