Gearing up for the Vancouver City Chase!

Posted by holly on Aug 26, 2010 in Americas, Blog

It’s that time of year again: time for the Vancouver City Chase!

Quite possibly my favorite day of the year, it’s the only day that I get to run around like a madwoman, doing all sorts of random adventures in the best city in the world! At this point all we know is where the start/finish line is and that a secret hint delivered by facebook directs us to Portside Park, but what we have to do there is still a mystery. Awesome. And just because they love me (yes, I choose to believe this), they have decided this year to hold it on my birthday. Yep, Saturday is all about meeeeee!!

So now we’re in prep mode, which is always an interesting thing to do when you don’t know what you’re prepping for. My teammate is hitting the gym (of course, two whole days of exercise is going to make a huge difference, lol!) and I’m hitting the streets, trying to familiarize myself with the areas downtown I don’t often get a chance to see. Like I had no idea where Portside Park was until I google mapped it. With the Canada Line getting you from downtown to Richmond in 20 minutes, that opens up a whole new section of Vancouver that we never could access before, since you would loose too much time in transit to actually complete the race in the allocated 6 hours. My spider-sense is telling me to check out areas around the Canada Line stops. Since my office is not too far from a Canada Line station, I already have my coworkers prepped that if I call they’ll quickly do anything I need (love them!). Going near work would be too awesome for words. But, of course, I could be way off and doing all this for nothing as the route this year could be completely in the other direction. That surprise is the wonder of the Chase.

So far this year, in the other City Chases accross Canada, they have done stuff like strip bowling, holding a live crocodile, whitewater kayaking, shooting machine guns and completing a military obsticle course, so God knows what we’ll be asked to do, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be epic.

And I’m going to love every second of it.

Full recap to follow!!!

Tags: awesome, City Chase, race, The Amazing Race, vancouver

I totally just ate under a plane! – Costa Rica days 6 & 7

Posted by holly on May 21, 2010 in Blog

I totally just ate under a plane. I know I said that in the title, but that doesn’t take away from the awesomeness of it. El Avion, a plane turned restaurant in Quepos/Manuel Antonio, is quite possibly my favorite place to eat on the planet, right up there with the seafood restaurant in the middle of Temple Street night market in Hong Kong. What can I say, I’m a sucker for ambiance. And this place has it in spades, because IT HAS A FRIGGIN PLANE in it!

The plane itself is perched on the cliffside so that your table along the railing looks out over nothing but lush trees far below and the uninterrupted Pacific ocean. We were even lucky enough to have a pair of Spider monkeys dine parallel to us on a tall tree limb, but that’s just de rigeur in Costa Rica The building (if you can call it that, it has no walls, so it’s technically more of a roof) is constructed over the fuselage itself, complete with a little bump up for the tail fin, and you eat at tables around the engines and cargo hold. Inside you’ll find the bar (I can just imagine the conversations that occur when people wake up the next morning: ”Dude, I was so wasted last night I thought I was drinking in a plane in the jungle” – “You were drinking in a plane in the jungle, Steve” – “Woah”), and the kitchen is downstairs. In what I think is an ingenious space-saving technique, the kitchen is downstairs, and all the orders are lifted to dining level in a giant dumbwaiter constructed from parts of old, much smaller private planes. Now you’re getting why I love this place, right? The food is good, and not any more expensive than your standard meal at Applebees, but I’m honestly not paying any attention to the food when I’m here. And I have a sneaking suspicion I may be back here again to eat before leaving Quepos.

Were picked up by Interbus for another life-altering drive down the “holy crap I’m going to die” roads from Monteverde to… well, pretty much everywhere from there, but we ended up in Quepos. This is our longest stay of the trip, 4 nights instead of the 2 in the other cities. It’s also the largest city we’re spending any amount of time in, although when we drove in I found myself thinking, “this is it? Isn’t it supposed to be bigger than this?” The other cities had grown up so much in the past three years, but Quepos really hadn’t. It, as I discovered later, had grown out, so that the suburbs were larger and more developed, but the city center was the same two-hundred-foot square of shops and services as before.

Our hotel, the adorable and friendly Hotel California, is nestled up in the trees, and, since it was low season and there was tons of space available, we got upgraded to an oceanview room. That was pretty damn sweet. I may be a travel agent, but I’m still too cheap to pay for something as trivial as a view, although getting one free rocks.

OMG, it’s hot here. After the chill and dampness of Monteverde, this heat is oppressive. Came back into our room this afternoon and it felt freezing – we thought we’d left the AC on too cold until we checked it and discovered it was a chilly 27 celsius in our room! It had to be at least 40-45 outside for 27 to feel that cold.

Spent the first afternoon wandering town, shopping and trying to get aclimated to this heat again. This morning it was a very early wake up call for our Manuel Antonio National Park walk. When in Manuel Antonio, this is a must - it’s called the most-photographed place in Costa Rica for good reason, it’s stunning. Plus, there are so many animals that no two hikes are the same, and you never know what’s going to pop up. The guides carry a big-ass telescope, and when they spot something (god knows how they do it, some of the frogs and lizards are so small you can barely see them after you’ve stepped on them, but the guides can do it at a hundred feet) they focus in and get you a great view. Plus, digital cameras take pretty sweet pics through the telescope lens, so you can get your pics home and tell everyone you really were that close to a sloth, eventhough it was sleeping forty feet over your heads!

Immediately following the tour and a quick lunch, it was on to tour number 2 – the Villa Vanilla spice plantation. Cannot recommend this place highly enough (www.rainforestspices.com) the guide explained to us all about vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, chillies, turmeric, oregano, and whatever I’m forgetting – holy crap these things are super labour intensive to produce. It’s no wonder they’re so expensive. And who would have thought that the second layer of bark on a tree would taste so good (cinnamon)? Did they just decide one day to start gnawing logs? After walking through the fields we were taken to a hut with another great view and given samples of all sorts of decadent desserts prepared with their spices by their own pastry chef. Heaven. I then proceeded to spend USD$40.00 in their gift shop and it was so totally worth it!

Tonight we’re going to recover from all the walking today, because tomorrow we’re ATV-ing!! I’m the girl who gets in trouble for her driving on Disneyland’s Autopia, so this is going to be interesting. And awesome!