March 26 – Rachel and I attended the Left Coast Crime 2019 (Whale of a Crime) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia last week. As stated on the conference’s website, “Left Coast Crime is for fans of the mystery/crime genre: readers, authors, librarians, bloggers, publishers, editors, agents, and booksellers.” We attended this conference in Honolulu in 2017, and a trip this year to Vancouver was an opportunity too good to pass up.
I’ll add a post to my blog each day detailing the travel required, the conference, and a few tourist-type things I enjoyed while in Canada.
Not wanting to take a chance on missing my flight, I set a 4:00 a.m. alarm for an 8:20 a.m. departure on Southwest Airlines. Since we live only 15 minutes from the Phoenix airport, you might be wondering if I overthought this. Yes, I did. We left the house at 6:03, drove to the airport, parked, checked bags, and went through security…by 6:46. A whopping 43 minutes. Our flight departed on schedule and we arrived in Seattle about 10:55, early by approximately 30 minutes (kudos to Southwest). We picked up our luggage, had a bite to eat, and waited to meet the 1:00 p.m. shuttle bus to Vancouver.
The shuttle was on time and we left Sea-Tac at 1:15, made one stop for additional passengers at a downtown Seattle hotel, and began our journey to Vancouver. The traffic was, in a word, awful…all the way to Vancouver. At the border, all the shuttle passengers had to take all possessions and visit a Canadian Border Services officer. She asked us where we were going (Vancouver), where we were staying (Metropolitan Hotel), why we were going (conference), what kind of conference (mystery writers and fans), who is the writer (me), and why is your wife here (she’s a fan). She chuckled, returned our passports, and told us to enjoy our stay. The officer was extremely pleasant, buy why the chuckle?
As we approached Vancouver, traffic became worse. The shuttle driver dropped off passengers at hotels all over downtown Vancouver. We are certain we passed some skyscrapers numerous times as we wound through the city. Of course, we were the last passengers to reach our hotel. As odd as it sounds, we arrived at the scheduled time…5:45 p.m. I was disappointed it took so long, but maybe I had been spoiled by being “early” for so many other parts of the trip.
The Metropolitan Hotel was a wonderful place to stay, and it was only two blocks from the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency. We checked in, then walked to the Cactus Club Café for dinner near the hotel. After dinner, we walked another few blocks to Vancouver Harbor, where the Vancouver Convention Center and Canada Place are located. We had fantastic views of the city all around. After an hour or so of taking pictures, we returned to the hotel and called it a day.
An observation about our travel day: Southwest Airlines does not charge for checked bags, but doesn’t fly to Vancouver. Many other airlines fly to Vancouver but charge outrageous fees for each checked bag. The cheaper Southwest flight to Seattle and relatively inexpensive shuttle to Vancouver seemed like a good idea. We sacrificed time to save some money. One more thing I might have overthought.