Departure

Here's a probably uninteresting update, mainly about flying from Sydney to Vancouver.  On Tuesday night, Mum, Dad, Angus and I went out for dinner at the Manly Pavilions restaurant.  I cleverly decided to end the meal with a short black which meant that I got about 3 hours of fitful sleep - never an excellent way to prepare for a 16 hour plane flight.  Anyway, everything went fine and I got on the plane for my flight to LAX.
QANTAS seem to have some kind of affirmative action thing going on, as all their flight attendants were, not too put too fine a point on it, quite old.  As my friend Seb said recently, it's good to see the airline keeping people out of retirement homes.  Entirely unsurprisingly, the food was terrible and I arrived at LAX feeling like shit.  Luckily, transit through customs at LAX was as quick and painless as could be reasonably expected, and most importantly it was a lot less, uh, invasive than I was dreading.
The flight from LAX to Vancouver was uneventful and I slept for most of it.  The pilot pointed out Yosemite and Mt St Helens as we flew over.  Both were huge and unmissable, and I look forward to checking them out from the ground.
Clearing customs and immigration at YVR was made more painful by the utterly inane conversation of two American businessmen behind me in the queue.  I managed not to beat them to death with a stanchion, in an amazing feat of self-control.  My mate Mitch had said that he'd try and meet me at the airport, but I couldn't see him, so I wandered out to the skytrain.  He'd told me to go to a station that was four blocks from his house, but I cleverly neglected to write down the name of the station.  I knew it had "house" in it's name, and managed to guess the right one.  Wandering out of the station, I realised that I'd also neglected to write down his phone number.  Genius.  Luckily I found a Starbucks and got me some free wi-fi, getting both his number and confirming that I'd gone to the correct station.  I called him and found that he was still at the airport, looking for me.  Oops.
After dropping my stuff at his place, we went for a short walk with his enormous but ridiculously well-behaved dog, Tona.  Last night we went out for dinner at a Lebanese place called Nuba with Kaila (Mitch's GF), Tim and Andrea.  Despite nary a Lebanese person in sight, it was good.  Tim and Andrea headed off to see the Kings of Leon, and Mitch and Kaila took me for a bit of a wander.  We had a sneaky drink, then, as I was barely able to keep my eyes open, headed home.  I crashed out and got an excellent night of sleep, and am feeling a lot more human now.
This afternoon I plan to take Tona out for a bit of a walk along the seawall.  I'll take my p&s and get some piccies.  As part of his course to become a personal trainer, Mitch needs to run a certain number of boot camp style things, so I'll head out to that this evening too.  Word.