February 13, 2023
Getting Sorted for Last Week in Vancouver
There's a lot to catch up on since all that happened in Texas, but while I was facing my own set of challenges on the bike, my wife had hers to deal with back in Vancouver. One of them was that the host of the Airbnb kicked her out of the place that we had already booked in Vancouver and were going to stay for the final week. So I managed to sort the problem out. It made for hours on the phone and online while occupying a comfortable seat but hey, that's what a Starbucks in Round Rock Texas is for.
In the end, my wife was able to book a nice hotel downtown for a couple days during the transition where I stayed with her before we consolidated all our luggage and moved to the next Airbnb across the bridge.
Speaking of the bike problems, Air Canada said they would call me back and arrange the delivery of the folding bike to our new Airbnb address but they never did. So I called them again several times in the morning and got the same old song and dance. The bike is sitting in the airport as I type this.
Meanwhile, much of the time was spent cleaning out that old suitcase from Pasadena I had successfully retrieved. Unfortunately while taking the train over from the airport, the wheels broke off and it was no long useful. That made for a nice excuse to throw away the suitcase and buy a new one at a shop down the street.
One of the nice things about this temporary downtown stay was that everything was within walking distance and there wasn't even a need for a bike. Back in Texas it was impossible to find any neighborhoods like this, and even a bike made it very difficult and time consuming to shuttle around. That's why I got so used to making phone calls, as I wanted to double and triple check to make sure that the places I was going to had the necessary things. But there were several occasions when I biked somewhere for nothing, for example Walmart.
So I really appreciated the convenience of living in a downtown location where you could just walk a few blocks and get everything you needed.
Last night I had spent hours cleaning out that suitcase and assembling all the coins and papers. This appeared like a huge mess at first, but there was method to my madness. The idea was to arrange all the papers in batches and then spend all of next week doing a little bit of digitizing at a time at Staples. They have a work station where you can scan these papers into PDF files. It is all part of my ongoing minimalism project.
The coins were then separated into two different containers, one for Hong Kong Dollars, the other for Thai Baht. These will be spent at a later trip.
Next we assembled all the luggage together and got an Uber across the bridge to the next Airbnb where we'll be staying for a week and running the last series of errands. Good news is that drivers licenses and Canadian IDs are in my hands now and valid for another 5 years. Bank accounts are more or less set up in both Canada and the US, now I just need to make links online between all the accounts. Still waiting on those credit cards but hopefully they'll arrive this week.
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