We've just returned from a weekend getaway in Vancouver to celebrate our birthdays. We aggregated the kindness or our fabulous parents (time share points from Dia's folks, cash money from mine) to spend the weekend in a one bedroom apartment in the Canadian sky.
On the face of it, we didn't do too much. We had a fabulous Friday dinner at Bin 941, which is in my Top 10 places to enjoy a meal. Yesterday involved a quest for the new Huruki Murakami novel and the Bin 941/942 cookbook, and a rainy day spent hanging out in our plush pad. Rather than go out we watched movies and drank wine and ate food we bought within a two block radius of our abode.
It may not sound like a spectacular weekend in a city but to us it was perfect. Vancouver is one of the six cities on our list os "places we'd like to live for an extended time that aren't Seattle," the others being Amsterdam, San Francisco, Manhattan, Chicago, and London.
This was our second Vancouver weekend in three months and kinda felt like a test run of being there for awhile. When we were in Amsterdam last year we spent a week playing house on a houseboat, buying our provisions, getting to know each block of the surrounding neighborhoods, and I think this is our travel M.O. We've each done the breakneck, ride the rails, gobble-up-as-much-of-a-country-as-you-can-in-a-week thing multiple times. Now, I guess, we've started to ripen as individuals who have seen enough surfaces to know that we want some depth, where "depth" means being in a place for more than a bit.