vancouver, thank god

Just enjoyed a brief but much-needed respite in Vancouver. The day before we left, Dan and I were so excited about going to a real city that we could hardly sleep. It'd been five full days in Hope at that point, and it felt like nothing less than a month. Five days is a long time to listen to the drone of your own mind.

First stop in Vancouver was the Bobcats. The Bobcats have been playing at the same pub on Denman St. every Sunday for years, and it's been the epicenter of Brickley Family Funtimes for much of my adult life -- I even made Kelli and Sam come when we visited Vancouver a couple years ago. This video is pretty terrible but I felt self-conscious standing on the dancefloor with my FlipCam, especially since everything about the Bobcats is supposed to transport you to a decidedly pre-FlipCam era.



The crowd was all 60+, but they looked 80+ (hard livin'), and they danced like they were 50. In other words, we had the BEST TIME. Seriously. The waitress was speedy with the Granville Island Lager and of course we knew all the songs, earning us some approving and slightly salacious nods from the crowd.

Yauni and Dave picked us up and took us to the best Indian meal I've ever had in my life, at Vij's in South Granville. Yauni is an old family friend, the kind of friend where your mom has pictures of her in your bathtub when she was two. Dave, Yauni's boyfriend, promotes shows in Vancouver, which is actually his family business -- his father was the Bill Graham of Vancouver, and he has actual stories about Grandmaster Flash crashing in his childhood bedroom. Later we went back to their apartment and Bonnie (Yauni's mom / family BFF dating back to my parents' hippie days) came over with a frostbitten bottle of vodka in her purse. Pretty sure Yauni is contributing to the heated conversation about my mom's amazing wheat-germ-covered-frozen bananas in this picture...


The next morning Dan and I took the Aquabus to Granville Island, where we spent most of our time at the Kids Market wishing we were seven. SNOOPY SNO-CONE MAKER!


Then Yaunie and Dave took us on a driving tour of Vancouver (awesome except for the pouring rain), shopping on Robson, and then to Commercial Drive for dinner at an ancient Italian restaurant called Nick's that is recently enjoying a hipster renaissance, probably largely to do with the bibs.


Then we went to Casa Gelata (218 choices of ice cream flavors but they were out of my favorite, Tiger Tail, so I tried to manufacture my own with one scoop of black licorice and one of orange sherbert, which I don't actually recommend, nosiree) and drove the long dark highway back to the boondocks. Awoke this morning to our first substantial requests from Actual Work (FunMo/Outlaw), blech...