Garnet's Life Adventures

North America trip update part 1

I left the UK on a Wednesday around noon and arrived in Vancouver with Tash around 2pm. Don't I wish that was just a 2 hour flight!!! Of course it wasn't, it was a 10 hour flight with a small screaming child most of the way and rather bad turbulence over Greenland as the jet streams changed. With a day & a half to kill, we went out exploring (really more so to keep ourselves awake & get onto the right time zone) and found lots of cool things in the city (see photos in other posts).

The conference was really really good, just exhausting getting up at 6am every morning & not finishing till 6om earliest (10pm some nights). The really cool part was that people from my former work where there as well so it was nice to get to catch up with them and find out how they're doing. Plus they do work on infections as well so we understood each others work more so than when the speakers on autoimmunity spoke, which btw there were a lot of!! Hey Ms Cheesewiz, you & your readers will be happy to hear there were LOTS of MS researchers at the meeting & they seem to be doing tons of interesting work!

I have to admit the "best" part of the conference was the last day when Vicky (aka Sister Itafari) & John arrived from Portland for a visit! Tash & I were sitting in the last lectures of the day when we both sorta hit that wall of concentration/ability to take in any more information and all I could do was count down the minutes till we were done. When that time came we both walked calmly (okay semi ran) to reception to wait for V&J. They arrived shortly after us & we all sat in the bar lounge area and had a wonderful catch up story telling gab, it was divine. A few hours later Tash's cousins arrived and the 6 of us went out to dinner where we giggled a ton more over stories from our pasts - just an over all lovely evening!

The next day Tash & I checked out and went out separate ways to start our holiday. I moved to the hotel V&J were staying at and along the way stopped off at the 9th Ave Grill on Howe St in downtown Vancouver, which I highly recommend to everyone/anyone who goes there, tell Darcy I sent you! Later that day Vic & I went for pedicures and of course more chatting! We decided to do a pay-it-forward party in New York on September 26th, so keep that date clear on you calendars! We had a lovely Indian dinner followed by Tim Horton's donut for dessert YUM! I even got an extra donut to save for my breakfast the next morning as I had an 8.30am flight to Montreal.

need another nap, will write more later

Labels: canada, itafari, MS, travel

posted by Sara @ 8:22 pm