Just a Bunch of Drones

So our day got started a little later than the past week, but sleeping in a comfortable bed was a luxury we all wanted to savor. Again, the view from our hotel room was great, so waking up to that was a treat (not as great as the Pacific Ocean, but still not too shabby.) We stayed until we absolutely had to check out, and decided that our activity for the day would be to play frisbee golf. One problem...we had no discs. We figured there would be some store in the city that we could find them at. So we set off on a little urban hike through Vancouver. The city was really clean, and everyone really took care of themselves and dressed well.

We stopped at a food truck for lunch. The only reason that we picked this one was because there was a line. It was for some chicken sandwich that I thought was awesome, but Scott and Steve weren't as impressed. After we finished that, we continued on with our quest to find the discs. At this point we had been wandering around for a little while, and having a hard time navigating the city. I don't mean street names, I mean trying to walk in a straight line on the sidewalk. People in Canada don't yield if you are walking, so there was a lot of ducking and dodging going on. We were not having any luck with the discs and everyone I asked had no idea what disc golf was. I was shocked, but they kept telling me where I could buy a frisbee, or to "try Sears." We were all noticing that the people (including us) were barely thinking for themselves and kinda just wandering around aimlessly.

We tried 4 more stores, which basically took us on a tour of the entire downtown area and then decided to give up. We went to the disc golf course, asked someone where to get discs, and they pointed us in the direction of a shop ~5 blocks away. Finally, we found the discs (which we about 75% more expensive than at home) and were ready to play. Now I had never played before so I would be interested to see what would happen. It was pretty fun, but Steve was only able to play the front 9 because he made an unsuccessful attempt at a hole that carried a good distance over the water. (Splash) At one point, Scott noticed that the casual conversation and actions of the people on the course seemed like something out of the Sims. Everyone was just acting like a bunch of drones. This was a very keen observation and we all noticed it for the rest of the day. After that we decided to go to our new hotel, the Howard Johnson.

Just a little back story, I wasn't thrilled about staying at a Howard Johnson, but when it came down to it, it wasn't that bad. It was definitely not the hotel we stayed in the first night though. We grabbed a couple drinks and watched some of the Eagles/Steelers game in the hotel bar then got ready to head out for dinner; tonight was sushi night. We "Yelp'd" a bunch of sushi places and found one that was rated as being pretty good, so we hit it up and it was in Yaletown. Apparently, Yaletown was another good place to go out, so this would work out perfectly. When we got to the sushi place, Scott took over since he worked at a high-end Japanese restaurant in San Diego. We ended up doing Sake bombs, which Steve and I were very reluctant to do because it sounded obnoxious and messy. Basically, Scott told us to balance the Sake glass on chopsticks over a glass of beer and then bang on the table chanting, "Sake, sake, sake bomb" and then hit the table really hard, have the sake drop into the beer and drink it all. I was very skeptical about this. The majority of the trip Scott earned the nickname Skeptical Scott, but tonight I was taking over that role.

So we tried a couple and they were not bad, but made a bloody mess. The servers were pretty tolerable of it, and we didn't seem to be bothering anyone else. The sushi was pretty good, but they put lettuce in every roll, which I thought was strange. Besides that I was pretty happy with it. Once we settled our bill, we headed off to find a place to grab a couple drinks. We found the Yaletown Brewery and made it our home for the night. Steve was kind enough to buy me a Smirnoff Ice, which I originally turned my back to (literally) until the bartender came around and gave it to me. I did my civic duty and took a knee to chug it. What a stupid, but fun game.

The bar was pretty cool, it had an Iron Hill-like feel to it. We all bought one round of drinks there and then headed back to the hotel. We were all pretty burnt out from the night before and the long day of walking around like drones. We found a cab, and went back to the lovely HoJo and decided to have one more drink at the hotel bar before calling it a night. They had these "Sub-Zero" taps, where the tap itself was kept below freezing so the beer came out super cold. I was a big fan of this and also a big fan of drinking Molson Canadian while in Canada. Put the two together, and I was a happy camper. We retired back up to the room and called it a night. ULTRA day 26/39: COMPLETE.

JM