Two different drives were offered on Friday. One was a tour of metropolitan Vancouver, with breakfast at one Volvo dealership and lunch at another. The other was a 100-mile jaunt up the Sea to Sky Highway to the ski resort town of Whistler (and then 100 miles back).
Now let me see. Would I rather go eat donuts standing around a bunch of new cars, drive around in dense downtown traffic and then eat sandwiches standing around another bunch of new cars, or would I like to take the 1800S on a day trip over nice twisty roads, through the fjords by Horseshoe Bay and take in a scenic stop or two before heading up into the mountains to a beautiful place we'd never been before? Tough choice.
When Gregg Morris and Dave McAree finished explaining those choices to us in the Tsawwassen Inn's lobby that Thursday evening, and 90% of the people attending promptly marched over to the donuts and new cars side of the room -- including Cam, Bob, Peter, and Shayne and Sarah Green (who didn't travel up with us because they'd already gone ahead some days earlier) -- I was amazed. I should just assume it by now, but seems I still need frequent reminders that Volvo people are the worst flakes on the planet. They, on the other hand, thought Marsha and I were perverse. So be it.
We were up bright and early the next morning. Following a fine (and free) continental breakfast at the hotel, we took the 1800S across the street to the Delta Recreation Center parking lot, where we understood the few of us opting for scenery would gather. An older gent in a white 240 had the only other Volvo there, and I struck up a conversation with him. He was having some trouble with a squealing belt and alternator warning light, no doubt because the thing's adjustment had come loose, and I offered to take a look at it. Just then, though, more Volvos began lining up on the main street, so I told him we'd have to go now but I'd be glad to look into it later -- no problem.
I started the car and drove to the parking lot exit so we could join the line-up when they were ready to roll. At that point, Marsha expressed an urgent desire to visit a rest room, like the one across the street at the MacDonalds. No arguing with that -- we crossed the street. The other cars rolled as we pulled up to an interminable red light at the only exit to the MacDonald's parking lot. It didn't let us through until several minutes after the last other Volvo had disappeared from sight. We'd been the first to arrive at the station and had nonetheless missed the train.
VCBC had foreseen such an eventuality (perhaps they'd encountered the hotel's continental breakfast's side effects before) and had thoughtfully provided us with directions through Vancouver onto the Sea to Sky Highway, so we set off in pursuit on our own. Not hot pursuit, though, as Vancouver has horrendous rush-hour traffic and we were in it. One time we simply could not get into the correct lane for a necessary turn and had to loop around several blocks to get back on track. Buses and trucks seemed bound to swipe our mirrors right off the car on narrow thoroughfares and there were construction delays everywhere. I spent over an hour peacefully and calmly remaining pretty hot under the collar until we crossed the Lion's Gate bridge on the far side of town and emerged onto open highway. We soon caught and passed the slower cars bringing up the rear of our tour. I felt a lot better.
A very scenic while later, everyone stopped at a park by the foot of Shannon Falls. There's a huge ridge of granite towering above the softer landscape below, and the volume of water coming over it makes our own Multnomah Falls look downright puny. This is the second largest hunk of granite in the world, the first being the Rock of Gibraltar. I had no idea such a grand place existed -- such are the joys of choosing driving over donuts.
We moved on after a good "Ooh" and "Ahh" session, now beginning to climb into mountains. Before this stop I'd had to trail a slow PV for a while, and now it was back in front and slower than ever. I have no objection whatsoever if people want to travel at their own pace, particularly when there's lovely scenery all around, but they really should do it in the right lane. I eventually passed them on the right a second time, which they probably thought very rude of me.
We then fell in with three other 1800s led by Charlie Teetzel. Charlie has a rusty 1800E which he went plenty fast in at the IPD track day in Portland a few years back, and he went plenty fast in it this day, with Bob Skoog and wife in an early 1800S impressively keeping up. Jerry Palfetier's modified 1800E wasn't much challenged by Charlie's pace, but we had our work cut out for us. I couldn't use full throttle without getting pinging (I've since put different needles in the old SUs and tinkered the ignition advance to correct this) and the brakes had been increasingly juddering at speed (warped rotors, since replaced -- this was more of an issue on the way back down the mountain, of course), but I managed to keep them in sight as they passed all other traffic all the way to Whistler.
Whistler is just what you'd expect from a ski resort town, very much like Mammoth in California. It's mostly new and built in a half-baked pseudo-Alpine style. One wanders through plazas full of souvenir shops and restaurants of every description -- very pleasant to visit and probably infuriating to live in full time. Marsha and I toured all the restaurants three times before deciding on The One to have lunch in.
And a fine lunch it was. We warmed up at a toasty table near the fireplace. The coffee was excellent, as were the sandwiches. I was intrigued by the "smoked Montreal meat" sandwich, which the waiter explained to me was a Canadian specialty somewhere between corned beef and pastrami. In fact, turns out Montreal meat is a kissing cousin to boloney and nothing like either corned beef or pastrami -- but anything would have tasted good on that excellent bread with crisp cucumbers and other stuff they'd put on it. We left sated and content.
I liked going up the hill with Charlie, Jerry and the Skoogs, so we joined up with them again going back down. Hoping to avoid the worst of evening rush-hour, Charlie proposed a different route through Vancouver rather than retracing our tracks. Now, Charlie was the sole Canadian in our group of cars, but he's from the wilds of Alberta and not from Vancouver at all, so that's a little like me suggesting a cool way through Seattle traffic because I know my way around Los Angeles (just kidding, Charlie!). Avoid the rush hour we did not. Given the choice of losing sight of the group or being crushed by trucks determined to get into our lane whether or not we already in it, I opted for the former. We soon found ourselves going five MPH on a freeway we didn't know and didn't have directions to or from. My collar calmly began heating up again.
Some time later, we arbitrarily abandoned the freeway and found ourselves in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. This was a stroke of luck, as Marsha and I had stayed in Burnaby several times on earlier visits and I had some idea of how to get from there to the Tsawwassen ferries. Remarkably, we pulled this off and got back to Delta only a few minutes behind Charlie and the others. Turns out we'd accidentally followed the exact route Charlie had had in mind all along, except we'd pulled into a gas station for a few minutes to figure out how to go.
Also just getting back from the city tour were Cameron and Bob, who were quite happy with what they'd seen of Vancouver -- in all fairness, that tour did include more than just visits to two dealerships -- and not at all pleased at the rate at which they'd spent the day moving. While they were driving, a butterfly had landed on Bob's arm to take a break before flying on and passing more Volvos. It's unknown whether the butterfly needed overdrive to do this, but certainly the Volvos had no chance to use theirs.
Peter had a more entertaining experience, having been driven around by Klaus in Gregg Morris's very nice 123GT. I'm darned if I can remember Klaus's last name, but he's the guy who several times won the Shell rallies across Canada in the 1960's driving 122s. Klaus took the same approach to crossing downtown, and they'd spent much of the day driving on sidewalks and bombing through construction zones on the wrong side of the cones. Anything for first pick of the donuts, I suppose.
