Our Canadian adventure begins!

Saturday 7th September

Our alarms went off at 5:30am to get the last bits ready for our taxi to take us to the airport at 6:30am. We arrived at Heathrow just after 7am and had already managed to check in – with lovely business class seats thanks to Dad! We dropped off our luggage which was quite slow but then went through security pretty quickly and down to the gate to wait for our flight. We boarded quickly and found our very nice seats!

We took off at 9:50am and the flight was just over 9 hours. We had a nice drink and three course lunch soon after takeoff, both watched a film and some other TV and then had afternoon tea before landing – spoilt! It was lovely and we made the most of it in case it was our last time in business class!

Before landing we saw some beautiful views of the Rockies (where we will be going) as it was a lovely clear day.

9 hours later, we landed in Seattle – 11:30am local time the same day (8 hours behind UK time) – so we had gone back in time which felt odd.

We got off the plane and waited around a while for our bags, but eventually we were happy to see they turned up. We flew through customs by downloading an app that our friend had given us a tip to download (despite the usual wait times) and then went to get the train to Chinatown in more central Seattle. We booked onto the 4:45pm bus from Seattle to Vancouver, so we had a couple of hours to kill before then. As we were in Chinatown, we walked around and found something for dinner (as it felt like dinner time to us)! We got some takeaway Thai food – a veggie stir-fry and a phad Thai to share. It was yummy!

We weren’t in that nice area of Seattle and we had the suitcases with us so we didn’t do anymore exploring. We just headed back to the bus station where we waited for our 3 hour bus to Vancouver – getting quite tired now.

We got onboard and our coach left just in time at 4:45pm local time – we got front row seats.

We took in the surrounds for the first 15 or so minutes and then both just couldn’t keep our eyes open so dosed in and out of napping until we reached the USA/Canada  boarder at 7pm where we all got off the bus for customs/immigration checks. We were all ‘questioned’ but a rather scary seeming man who was very confused by Harry’s and my journey travelling to Seattle to then go to Vancouver (don’t blame him!) but we explained our staff travel situation and then he understood and relaxed and passed us through. While all the people on the bus were being questioned/checked, there was a black lab sniffer dog being taken around to sniff us all – he seemed very cute and friendly but definitely liked the smell of one of the young guys on our bus. He was pulled aside for a bit but then got back on our bus with the rest of us so all must have been ok!

We continued our journey and arrived at Vancouver station at 8pm local time. We then got a 10 min Uber to our Airbnb in South Granville Vancouver for the night, which was just what we needed for a much needed sleep!

After a quick shower before bed, we got off to sleep around 9pm local time, which was equivalent to 5am back home – so had been awake for pushing 24 hours! We had purposely tried to stay awake that whole time to allow us to have a really good sleep and hopefully not be jet-lagged.

We pretty much slept all the way through, waking up at 6am the next morning ready for a day with Harry’s cousin Hugo and his girlfriend Charlotte (who both live out there at the moment) being our tour guides for the day!