Wow this place is dusty. I haven’t been updating because last week I was in Vancouver. The purpose of the trip was because Pauline had a conference and I tagged along to do some tourist wandering as well as to use up some of my accumulating vacation time. We left on Wednesday and didn’t get back till midnight last night. That and having to work first thing in the morning means that I haven’t had time to unpack my luggage or my photos so I’ll blog more about what we did a little later.

We flew WestJet, and both flights went by pretty quickly, I remember a couple of flights from Seattle that seemed to drag on forever. Maybe it was because I had a DS this time. I kept myself occupied with Yoshi’s Island DS which is pretty neat — there are all sorts of control variations based on interchanging characters, and it would be an amazing game if I actually enjoyed side scrollers.

We stayed at the Plaza 500 which we pricelined for $75/night (3 star). The room was large, and ironically we had 2 double beds in our room the one time we didn’t need it. Before we got there, we were fearing the worse because the place got absolutely horrid reviews, but it wasn’t too bad. The hallways were old and dorm-like (tons and tons of rooms), and the ice machine was broken on our floor so if we wanted ice we had to go 4 floors up (!), but the lobby and our room was decent. It wasn’t as convenient as we wanted though; the hotel was beside city hall which meant a 5-10 minute drive to downtown and we had to pay $20/night for parking when apparently other hotels offer free parking.

We rented a car as well and this was an experience in bad money efficacy. I had been looking through the discount sites to get a measure on the prices, but had been holding back because I wasn’t sure what to do about the insurance and I wanted Star Alliance points in order to keep my account active. I had seen $15/day for compacts through the discount sites, but I wasn’t sure whether they would give my points. Eventually I reasoned that the links on the United site were extra deals to get additional points, and if I rented normally I should still be able to get (fewer) points. So I went ahead to book. By this time, the price had risen to $21/day. The second thing I wasn’t sure about was whether to get LDW or not, because it’s pretty expensive ($27/day). Some credit cards provided equivalent insurance and I wasn’t sure if my MBNA card did. So I called in and apparently I had “preferred” status which meant no insurance. After asking, my card was upgraded to platinum for free (because there were no yearly fees anyways) but unfortunately I would not be able to get my new card in time to book the rental. So I ended up paying for LDW myself.

Finally, I booked a compact because I wanted higher gas mileage. I ended up getting a Chevy Cobalt which had a trip computer that told me I was getting 11.1L/100km and only about 400km a tank. The clerk offered me an upgrade to a Camry for something like $4 extra per day, but I declined. In hindsight, maybe it would have been worth it because the Camry gets the same gas mileage!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: travelling, vancouver