Surrey

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Adopting a New Grocery Chain

One of the things I found very difficult in my cross-country RV journey was figuring out which grocery stores to frequent. Grocery prices out here are a lot higher than they were in Gatineau/Ottawa and every grocery store I visited left me feeling rather ill with sticker shock. I learned very quickly that Safeway, a major chain out west, is the worst price offender and I now avoid it at all costs.

Oliver had two supermarkets, Supervalu which was neither super nor offered any value for the dollar, and Buy-Low, a discount store with decent prices (for a small town), if poor selection. It was in my infrequent trips to Penticton that I discovered Save-on-Foods. Their prices were also very high, but if you join their (free) discount club and shop wisely, you can get very, very good deals. Since I moved to south Surrey, I’ve been alternating between the nearest S-o-F and the Super Walmart, which has a huge grocery section. Walmart is the place to go to get basic groceries, but it’s at Save-on-Foods that I find the little luxury items that make grocery shopping so much fun:

Two of my favourite food groups in one (Guinness cheddar!!!)

Two of my favourite food groups in one (Guinness cheddar!!!)

On a recent shopping trip, the cashier took a moment to better explain the rewards program to me and let me know that there is a scanner near the door that prints out personalized coupons. The more you use your card and shop at Save-on-Foods, the better the coupon selector becomes at offering you bonuses you will use. Today, I got a handful of coupons for products I buy almost every week and which were on sale, offering me a double discount!

I like that the discount card can be used at other businesses, like Chevron gas.

Some RVers have written in their own blogs that one of the things they dislike about RVing is having to relearn how to grocery shop at every new town, but I find that half the fun of traveling is scoping out the local grocery store for products you don’t have ‘back home.’

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Not as BRR as I expected!

Oh, I just love this RV. 😀

The cats and I had a cozy night. Neelix eventually wandered off to curl up by the electric heater while Tabitha crawled under the covers with me. Woke up to find it chilly in here, but not freezing, and I discovered that I hadn’t even cranked the electric heater anywhere near max. It was minus three outside.

Came in this evening expecting an ice box since it was below freezing all day, but, no.

Total degree loss between 10ish last night, when the furnace quit, and 5:30ish when I came in with propane: two degrees. Insulation in here’s better than I expected! Of course, I left the blinds open today and some (weak and rare) sunlight got in here today, but I’m still impressed!

I am now officially sick and tired of running off my 30lb tank so I’m going to call the propane company that delivers here and ask if they do a one time delivery. If not, I’ll take Miranda out at the beginning of March… which is next week (!).

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Bravely Forth Into the Ghetto

Well…

I think I deserve a ‘I stopped at a red light at East Hastings and Main and lived to tell the tale’ bumper sticker. *sheepish grin*

After all the worry and planning I realised that I was better off just going through this intersection than trying to contour it. East Hastings is a busy thoroughfare and it was rush hour; I figured that I was safer there in my car than wandering around blindly in neighbouring streets. I was accosted by a very aggressive squeegee guy, but I managed to convey through the glass that he had better back off.

East Hastings at highway 1 (a non scary section of this ill-famed thoroughfare)

East Hastings at highway 1 (a non scary section of this ill-famed thoroughfare)

Driving west on East Hastings was everything I’d been told it would be, a subtle descent into hell. I have seen some very scummy American slums and this is the first place in Canada that even remotely compares to the bad neighbourhoods I’ve been in south of the 49th parallel. Nothing I read about East Hastings and Main was exaggerated and I was very grateful to be in my car (albeit a target of one with a bright colour and an out of province licence plate!) and not on foot!

My colleagues all advised me to take public transit, but I am glad that I decided to drive. Majel has a hard time in the GVR for some reason, so I missed a couple of turns, but if it hadn’t been for that, I would have made it to my friend’s hotel in 40 minutes flat. I still squeaked in in under an hour when I’d been told it would take at least an hour and fifteen minutes! I parked at the hotel, which had better rates than I would have expected. My friend and I were so glad to see each other and we marveled that we were walking in downtown Vancouver of all places together!

For dinner, we hiked to Tanpopo, a sushi restaurant, where we had a great meal! We went for the ‘all you can eat’ option and let’s just say that we ate ALL we could eat. 😀 The food was awesome! There is a large selection of items on this menu and you pick the ones you want; they prepare enough portions for the number of diners. I’m more familiar with the ‘typical’ sushi restaurant menu, so I took the lead, but we did try a few items blindly. The real winners tonight were prawn gyoza (dumplings), salmon teriyaki (salmon baked with teriyaki sauce), and salmon sashimi (raw salmon, which I like with a bit of pickled ginger and soy sauce). Neither one of us liked the seafood fried rice and my friend wasn’t fond of the nori-wrapped scallop cones because she doesn’t like nori (a seaweed), while I loved them… because I love nori!

My friend’s hotel is on Robson Street, which I firmly intend to revisit as it is filled with quirky boutiques and restaurants! Getting there from home, or home from there, is a non-issue since it’s the same route I’d take to go to Stanley Park. In fact, I didn’t need Majel to get home tonight.

Driving home, I discovered soon as we passed the Massie tunnel in Richmond that I’d been afraid of the wrong thing.

We’ve been having gorgeous weather the last few days, but it hasn’t lasted. We got snow tonight and freezing temperatures and highway 99 became a sheet of ice. I took a full hour to drive the 20 kilometres I had left to go, passing at least a dozen cars in the ditch. People out here simply don’t know how to drive in these conditions. I geared down to second, slow enough for me to be able to stop on the snowy shoulder if I started to glide, glued my eyes to the road ahead, and just crawled all the way home.

So, I’m here safe and sound where it is freezing because I ran out of propane about five minutes after I turned on the furnace. :headdesk: There is of course no way I’m going back out there, so I’m hoping that the electric heater will be enough to keep us cozy tonight.

What a week I’ve had: crossing a suspension bridge (THREE times), experiencing East Hastings and Main, and successfully navigating my car down a 20km sheet of black ice. Can anyone recommend a good place in Vancouver to learn skydiving because I think that’s where I’m at now. 😀

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Circumventing the Ghetto

I forget where I was in September, but there was one city where I asked my GPS to take me to a grocery store and when I got there, I discovered that it was in a rather unsavoury part of town. I was very nervous and realised that software can’t protect you from taking a bad off ramp.

This was further evidenced tonight when I asked Google Maps to plot my drive from work to a downtown hotel where I will be meeting my friend tomorrow. It gladly obliged, helpfully telling me to follow Main and turn left at East Hastings. *cue in the horror movie music*

Yes, I am finally going to see downtown Vancouver tomorrow. And I’m driving there. At rush hour. My options were a forty-five minute transit ride from work to the hotel and a two hour bus ride home, or a potentially two hour rush hour drive and forty-five minute drive home. I decided that with what’s been going on in broad daylight lately, taking an unfamiliar transit route in the dark wasn’t something I wanted to do. Nor is going through the ghetto, even if it’ll supposedly shave ten minutes off my drive.

Wish me luck finding parking!

(All this intrepidness will be worth it for a sushi dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in six months!)

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Lynn Canyon Park

Today promised to be a gorgeous, springy day, with sun and highs in the double digits. Things have started to dry out considerably and I was just itching to get out of the city and enjoy a hike in the woods. My first instinct was to visit the Capilano Suspension Bridge. It’s not a cheap excursion (30$ entrance fee plus 5$ for parking), so I did some research on tripadvisor.com to see if it’s a tourist trap. Apparently, yes, because nearby Lynn Canyon offers a comparable experience at a price that can’t be beat: FREE!

Free sounded especially good since I wasn’t sure I’d actually get across a suspension bridge. I sure didn’t the last time I was faced with one!

Well, it seems that continued exposure to suspension bridges and a gondola ride have made me a little less of a scaredy cat and I wound up crossing the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge no less than THREE times! I will admit that I got across as quickly as possible, didn’t stop to take in the scenery, and shook like a leaf the whole way, but what progress!

Lynn Canyon is situated in the heart of a temperate rain forest and is a world of towering redwoods and pools of clear emerald water. Until today, I’d only seen water that clear and beautiful in Alberta. I spent two glorious hours enjoying the perfect weather (mid-single digits there) taking the first steps to getting in shape for the Chilkhoot hike. I finished my morning with a picnic lunch and then a stroll through the excellent Ecological Centre (2$ suggested donation).

Pictures are on the Lynn Canyon page.

Something wondrous happened today. I don’t know if it was the weather, the minimal GPSing I needed to do to get around, the amazing lack of traffic, nature, or what, but I… Oh, the English language is failing me here. In French, I’d say ‘apprivoisé’, which means tamed, but not quite for this context. I guess I’ll say I made my peace with the GVR, found something about it to love, discovered a little corner of it where I was happy to leave a tiny piece of my soul. The GVR is no longer a big, bad scary urban enclave (shootings notwithstanding), but a place that I will remember as being ‘home’ for four months in 2009.

Good day. 🙂