It started with a long journey: Manchester - London - Toronto - Portland. The flight from London to Toronto was delayed, then we discovered that to transfer to the US, we had to pick up our bags and take them through US Border Controls. Unfortunately, our bags didn't come off the flight... After much to-ing and fro-ing with a member of Air Canada's staff, we discovered the bags had been sent to the wrong belt in Toronto and eventually got hold of them... by now we'd been waiting over an hour. Then we had a look at the line for Border Control - that was going to take at least another hour, by which time we'd definitely have missed our connection.
We had conversations with two more of Air Canada's staff, both of whom were utterly useless and might as well have ignored us. Thank goodness we kept on trying, and the third one we asked finally helped and popped us in the front of the queue (sorry if you were waiting behind us!).
Why are the US border guards so scary? Already flustered through being about to miss my flight, the guard asked so many questions and made me nervous and stuttering! Eventually I got through and then did something I haven't done since the nineties... run! I surprised myself by how far I was able to run without dying... and somehow we made it on to the flight (which took off within a couple of minutes of our arrival!).
The weekend in Portland was fantastic - Oregon Bears really know how to put on a bear event. I'd highly recommend it - beartownweekend.com for next year! We met some great people, and even managed to swap our shirts at the shirt swapping party, no mean feat for two of the big guys!
Then on to Seattle, where we had a manic couple of days fitting in all the sights. We met up again with Jonathan, who we'd met in Portland and spent an enjoyable morning with him at the aquarium and getting fish and chips. We also did here what we always do on US holidays... find a branch of Casual Male XL (in Tukwila) and shop, shop, shop!
Final weekend was spent in Vancouver. We did our travelling between cities on Amtrak trains, which was a nice change from flying. Vancouver itself was very quiet, having been the location of a riot the night before we arrived. We spent the time there mainly pottering around, although we did have one night getting drunk on Peach cider...
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