The airplane was pretty full, but pretty much everyone was quiet and well-behaved. No crying babies or obnoxious children. I slept for part of the time, but the flight was pretty bumpy--a LOT of turbulence. I was glad that the flight only lasted 3 hours.
I arrived in Vancouver, BC, at around 12:30pm, got through customs pretty quickly, retrieved my bag, and took a cab to my hotel, the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. It is a VERY nice hotel. Everyone here is very polite. I checked into my room and promptly took a nap. zzzzzzzz................

This is Beau, one of the hotel dogs. The other hotel dog is Mavis.

This is the front of my hotel.

You can see the hotel reflected in the glass building next door. Pretty cool, right?

Hey, I was tired...I woke up and asked the concierge for the nearest grocery store. I walked there and bought some groceries, also picking up dinner at Subway. Unfortunately, I did not have the time for a fancy dinner. Instead, I had to spend some time cleaning up my powerpoint and making a few adjustments to the paper itself. I also spent quite a bit of time on the phone with Dr. Mitchell, just making sure that we had everything all worked out.

Oh, by the way, here's a cool thing that you should know. My room had a mini-bar, but it was one of those pressure-sensitive fridges that would charge you automatically if you even moved something in the mini-bar. But I wanted to go to the grocery store and get some supplies so that I wouldn't spend a small fortune in eating out. So I called housekeeping and told them I needed somewhere to store my insulin (which was partially true--I preferred to store it in the fridge, but the type of insulin I take is good for 28 days out of the fridge). Almost immediately, someone from housekeeping arrived with a little mini-fridge for me to use. Yay! I did put my insulin in it, but I also put in my snacks. LOL
The first day of my trip went well, and I got a good night's sleep on the VERY comfortable bed. Find out about Day 2 in the next post...