The Great Drs. Beth & Dan Victoria Adventure and Shenaniganery of 2011
It’s hard to believe that the great adventure and shenaniganery could have come and gone so fast, but it has!
The adventuring started when I greeted Dr. Dan, who was arriving on a flight from Toronto, in the manner most befitting his arrival:
We then proceeded to acquire a coffee for Dr. Dan, who had been up since 3 am Eastern time (!) and then headed to the ghetto part of the Vancouver airport where one catches a flight to Victoria. The flight to Victoria, by the way, takes about 15 mins of flight time. So, really, by the time you realize you’ve taken off, you are about to land. So much better than the ferry!
Our adventuring, not surprisingly, involved much in the way of food and beverages. We went to Lady Marmalade for my breakfast/Dan’s rebreakfasting. We wandered the streets of Victoria to see what was to be seen. Victoria, by the way, is very pretty! We may or may not have gone to two separate pubs during the course of the day to enjoy local Victoria beers. And I may or may not have discovered Phillips Service 1904 beer, one of the tastiest beers to have ever been tasted1! We also may or may not have taken some hilarious photos. Like this one:
Or this one:
The latter photo may have been taken after a conversation that went something like this:
Beth and Dan are walking along the boardwalk and see the statue.
Dan: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Beth: I am. Would you like me to take a photo of you doing that?
Dan: Yes. Yes, I would.
Sadly, the great adventure and shenaniganery was much too short, as I had to hop on a plane that was headed back to Vancouver early this morning, going straight to work from the airport. It did make me feel like a very important jetsetter, so there’s that at least.
P.S. If you’d like to read Dr. Dan’s more thorough account, with far more pictures than this posting2, here’s his post.
- I was telling a coworker about it today and she was all, “You’ve never had Phillips? You can totally just buy it in the liquor store.” A fact about which I am very, very excited. [↩]
- Also, all the pictures in this posting were stolen from Dr. Dan [↩]
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Tags: BC, Geekery, Official Statisican & Tattoo Consultant, people who are cool enough to travel with me, travel, Victoria
Wow Beth! You must really have it going on because Dr. Dan looks REALLY happy to see you! Glad you had so much fun.
More shenaniganning next time! We’ll have to make sure The Inspiration joins us. Three Nerds of Epic Awesomeness are bound to get up to hijinks and suchlike. And if my research is correct, shenaniganning works on the exponential scale. Something like this:
Let S be the amount of shenaniganning, N be the number of shenaniganners, Q_i be the awesomeness of each shenaniganner (on a scale of -1 to 1), and T_i the duration of shenaniganning (measured in days, and clearly a non-negative quantity). Then we can write
S=exp(sum_{i=1..N} [Q_i * T_i])-1
So, our Victoria adventuring would have measured S=exp(2)-1=6.4 (clearly rounded up). But if we added The Inspiration, we would have been shenaniganning at a 19.1 level. Can you even imagine that? Heads would surely have exploded.
The only time I ever flew Vancouver-Victoria (other than on a float plane, which is even awesomer), there was so much fog we almost weren’t allowed to take off. We didn’t see a single thing from approximately 20 seconds into the flight onwards, until we started coming in to land, dropped out of the fog VERY close to the ground, and the pilot had to do a sharp and sudden last-minute adjustment because he was coming in at an angle to the runway.
It was… exciting.
Mind you, the time I went by float plane, I was sitting right behind the pilot and had ear plugs in (those planes are LOUD) when he suddenly started a steep descent somewhere just west of the Gulf Islands, turned around, and started yelling something really urgently. I had several seconds of panic until I managed to fumble the ear plugs out of my ears, at which point I realised he was yelling “ORCAS!” and pointing at a large pod, surrounded by whale watching boats. He got low enough for a really good view, and circled around a few times before continuing on his merry way.
Also… exciting.
Although it wasn’t all bad: the earplugs also shielded me from the fact that the woman sitting right behind me had started puking as soon as we took off and barely stopped until we landed in Vancouver, a sight that everyone except the pilot and I had had to endure for the whole flight. If I’d seen it I’d have thrown up too, so overall it was a great flight.
Wow, those both sound very, um, exciting!
I haven’t been on a float plane, but it is on my new 101 list!