Several phone calls to Greyhound and we finally have our trailer and the camping gear that was also in the box! We are very relieved but we probably won't begin our trip until tomorrow morning because we haven't picked up our bike yet. The bike is still at the FedEX depot here and we didn't want to get it for two reasons. The first is that all our tools were in the box with the trailer so we wouldn't have been able to put our bike together and thus, would have had to figure out someway of getting a giant box back to Garrets house. And second, if our trailer box did get lost or took too long to arrive we may have had to cancel our trip and would have needed to ship our bike back home and that is much easier done with our bike in the box and located at a FedEX depot.
So, for the past couple days we've just been hanging out with Garret and his roomates and seeing Vancouver. Our first day here we bought a transit day pass and rode a bunch of buses and trains around the city(which is much larger than we realized). The olympic village was about the only "touristy" thing we saw. We also walked around UBC for a while and went to a beach there. Garret took us out for delicious Thai food and also to a coffee shop - this temporarily dulled the pain of not having our trailer. Other than that we mostly just frolicked and randomly walked around in various parts of the city. We also phoned Greyhound several times during the day and didn't get much information. It seems the strategy Greyhound uses for locating lost luggage is to passively wait and hope that it arrives at the station. This concept was very hard for us to accept since everything we needed for our trip was in that box. We would have much preferred an active searching strategy.
We have been calling Greyhound since we got here. Yesterday morning a lady said she would go down to the bus loading area and see if our box had came in and call us right back. She never called us back so we left a voice mail about an hour later. We didn't hear anything for the rest of the afternoon. We decided to call back around 4'o'clock and we learned that they had our box! So, we got to the station as fast as we could(~a 40min transit ride) and got our box. Now that we had our tools we could go get our bike :-) But, FedEX closes at 6 so we took the SkyTrain towards FedEx which is also the SkyTrain to Garrets so if, when we got to Garrets stop there wasn't enough time to make it a few more stops to the FedEx stop we would just get off at Garrets. By the time the train got near Garret's stop we only had ten minutes so, we just got off at the stop to Garrets house. We got subway and then put together our trailer and checked over all of our gear...everything was there and it all looked in good shape :-)
The plan for today is to get our bike when FedEX opens at 11am then put it all together and ride it back to Garret's house. Garret has gone to work at his new rowing coaching job so, Patricia and I are just having a lazy morning until 11 when our bike arrives. We estimate bike assembly to take at least a couple hours so, that would put us leaving in the early afternoon which wouldn't give us much daylight riding time. We will most likely be spending one more night here(much thanks to Garret and his roommates for putting up with us ;) ) and leaving bright and early tomorrow morning. Our goal is to make it 150km to hope but, that may be a tad ambitious for our first day...we'll see.
Now that we have our trailer and know our bike is safe we are in a much better mood. Some of the previous posts may have came off as being slightly bitter towards the trip but, we have met lots of nice people so far and the scenery along the entire bus trip was amazing. It really is an eye opener how different the terrain, culture, and the people are across the different parts of Canada we went through. Thats about all I can think of for now so, hopefully the next post is from us safe and sound in Hope, BC tomorrow night!
