Here I am in rainy Vancouver....Step one has been completed without any accidents or getting lost. The flight down was uneventful, pretty cloudy so nothing much to see. After all of my packing stress, I was 3 pounds overweight for Air Canada , so I had to check the suitcase after all. It weighed 25 pounds, and they only allow 22. But KLM allows 40, so I'll be fine tomorrow. I have all my valuables in my small carry-on anyhow, so it wouldn't have been too terrribly horrible if it had vanished.

I phoned Trevor (my nephew) when I arrived and he came and picked me up and was nice enough to take me shopping to the Richmond Centre Mall. I needed a light t-shirt and we eventually found one at Old Navy. Got to looove Old Navy. What a sport Trevor is, as I went from store to store, not finding what I wanted. Of course Old Navy was the first place we went and I didn't want to buy the first thing I saw, so we wandered all over and ended up back where we started...I should have just bought it in the first place!! Oh well, another "Auntie Shan" story to add to his collection

Then we drove through the rain, with me just praying that all the crazy city drivers wouldn't choose this night to get into an accident with us...I mean, being THISCLOSE to leaving, I was on pins and needles worrying about illnesses and accidents. We picked up Brendan and went to dinner, this nifty place called (I think) The Mongolian BBQ grill. A really fun place, where you choose your meat, veggies, noodles and sauce and dump it all in a bowl and this Mongolian chef tosses it all on a huge circular grill and cooks it in "less than 39 seconds." Excellent! Good conversation, good food, a fun way to start this trip. Thanks for dinner Brendan, and thanks for being a great chauffer Trev!

Off to my room now, must re-pack yet one more time and then watch a bit of TV, re-write all this in my "paper" journal, and try and have a good nights sleep. I told Trevor that if my plane had gone down between Cranbrook and here, I'd have been mightily pissed off, but if it goes down between here and Tanzania, well, I'll snap a few photos on the way down and go quite happily ;)