Vancouver, BC has always been a favorite weekend destination of mine and J's since moving to Seattle more than 5 years ago. Amazing Asian food can be found a mere 3 hour drive away in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond. An additional 2 hours beyond the city core along the Sea-to-Sky Highway puts us in Whistler/Blackcomb, one of the main venues for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We used to go so often that we enrolled ourselves in the Nexus Program, a border-crossing program in which card-carrying individuals are allowed to take a special lane at the border and essentially "cut" the line. The ironic thing is that ever since our enrollment, we have not gone to Canada as often, thanks to the rise in gas prices, the weak US dollar and a large morgage associated with the purchase of our house.However, we were on a mission this past weekend to purchase our OneWorld Explorer tickets at Vancouver International Airport (YVR), a transaction which involved a complex conversion of the original ticket price in British Pounds to Canadian Dollars to US Dollars. $75 for gas, $30 for sukiyaki dinner, $100 for a hotel room, $7 for pork buns, $200 loss to currency conversion and $15 for beef noodle soup later, we still saved over $2500 by purchasing our tickets in Vancouver! As a bonus, I was able to get my Nexus card in working condition again! Back in May, I got a new passport and this information needed to be updated in person before the Nexus card can be used again. Lucky for me, I unexpectedly came across a Nexus office in YVR which happened to be open for business on a Sunday!
With our tickets in hand, our bellies full of good Asian food and a week's stock worth of pork buns in the backseat, we headed our way back to Seattle with the intention of stopping by Burlington, WA to pick up WC, J's brother, who was in town this weekend for an ultimate tournament. Thank GOODNESS we could use our Nexus cards now that I had everything updated because the regular wait at the border was more than 2 hours long!!!! Less than 30 seconds after arriving at the border, we were back in the States.
Seeing WC was fun like always. Driving for 2 hours in torrential downpour was not fun. We were originaly going to grab dinner together somewhere before dropping WC off at the airport, but ended up not having enough time due to traffic. Still, we enjoyed good conversations and a delicious dinner of pork buns in the car as we drove back down to Seattle through the rain.
