Vancouver

Sitting in dublin airport for six hours trying not to buy irish tat seems like an age ago as I sit in a humid hostel in downtown Vancouver. I should have known things were a little off as our plane was delayed three hours. Being diligent travellers we'd all checked in three hours early which meant six hours of hanging out. Luckily there were 30 of us so banter wasn't exactly limited. It was fun watching the people doing the dublin-london commute that I had so frequented.... aaahhh, sweet freedom was in the air.

We flew with Globespan (globewho?) in premium economy. For premium read "cramped, stuffy" as it was the worst long haul jet i'd ever seen. The seats were ryanairesque but filthy, the arm rest was held together with duct tape, the toilet had a hand written "out of order sign" on it, the food was woeful, the tvs were tiny and very far away, the movies were 10 years old etc etc etc....

After 9 hours of that we got to vancouver to be greeted by a robotic immigration man "why are you here, where are you staying, when are you leaving". I managed to sneak into the country and finally smell that unique arrivals smell of baggage, kerosene, humidity and excitement.

Our hostel on the first night was beautiful, it was an old converted barracks by jericho beach in it's own grounds. All 18 of us were in one long room for two nights. The weather was pretty woeful so we mainly slept, played cards and did some light training on a pitch that I'd played summer league on years before.

Two days later we moved to UBC to our home for the next 12 days. After a few days training the tournament got under way. We were in the group of death with australia (17-9), GB (17-7), Germany (16-8) and the cheating colombians (12-8) and venezuelans (17-12). This put us into the bottom bracket where we finished 14th overall. The spirit prize cheered us up nicely. I'm not really up for doing a full report on the games but suffice to say they were incredibly tiring but fun.

On finals day our team had decided to do $17 saturday which involves dressing up a teammate using $17 of charity shop clothes and watching the final dressed like an eejit. what we didn't bargain for was being hauled up in front of 4000 people to collect our spirit trophy dressed like straw chewin hicks! ah the fun.

The trouble with going on the booze after a month off it is that you forget the simple things such as: look after your phone and wallet and don't break your laptop. Unfortunately I didn't do any of this and ended up having a bit of a shocker. I'm waiting on new cards to make their way over to me (mum - we need to have a quick chat about that one!).

So we managed to get out of UBC, finally, with a group of six of us intent on having fun (JD, Ois, Brian mcdev, Rob K and Pete Forde from cark). Trouble is, we had no plan! At about 5pm we headed downtown to get a hostel. We didn't bargain for a big gig being on in town and all the hostels being full. We were a bit stuck, unwilling to head back out to UBC or Jericho so we hopped on the horseshoe bay express, got our footlong subway sambos and boarded a ferry to nanaimo on vancouver island. The plan was to rent a log cabin for a few days and chill out.

What we ended up with was a lot of "we're full" and "you didn't book in advance?!". Finally we got a place in Campbell River about half way up the island. This is one of the many salmon capitals of the world (nearly every town claimed to be the capital, someone ought to sort this mess out!). Our log cabin turned out to be an RV park full of hicks with a tiny prefab and some mattresses. Once the initial shock subsided we found the place to be "charming" for want of a better word. We headed off in godlentrojan (our 6 man car) to the town centre which was essentially three shopping malls and three massive car parks. We stocked up on beer, steaks and marshmallows and headed back to create a campfire and bbq. Our cabin looked our over a massive bay with the rockies forming the horizon, it was actually quite beautiful. We sat there watching the shooting stars above and the cruise ships in the distance and just had a lads night in.

The next day we managed to haul our asses into gear and go trekking for 4 hours aruond elk falls on the campbell river. It was an easy hike but gave me reason to be scared about my knee falling off in alaska. This was capped off with a swim in a gorgeous lake surrounded by pine trees and the setting sun. There's been a lot of random swimming going on.

We checked out yesterday and went to some island for a day of kayaking, otherwise known as water wars. There were six of us lads and 7 others who formed a french family. The introductions were priceless as we decided to practice our french "Je m'appelle JD et mon colour favourite est vert", :"Je m'appelle alain et j'ai deux saours et un chat"! As soon as we were in the water we set about soaking anyone within soaking distance and doing high speed ram-capsizes. Boys will be boys!

After a day of that we had to head back to our ferry. Luckily Rob had booked us a hostel in vancouver for the night. Unluckily it was for the wrong night. Luckily we found this out at 6pm not 10pm and managed to book another hostel in the dodgy gastown area. Unluckily it was above a very noisy bar and we were tired. Luckily 6 pitchers of beer cured our tiredness!! A good night out and a hungover morning leads me to being right here in the hostel international downtown vancouver, sitting beside a funny looking chap who's spent the last hour playing tetris online. Such are the characters you meet on this travel buzz.