Although it will disappoint many, many people, I’m taking a break from the saga of my bike build to clear out the queue of half-written (and half-assed, given the obsessional devotion of my spare time to tinkering with or riding said bike) posts about what I’ve been doing so far.
My first big excursion was on the weekend after I arrived.* Dom and Alice had been both packing furiously and entertaining Alice’s parents, over for a holiday, but on the Sunday we were scooped up by Gillian from the Richmond office and carted off for some birthday celebrations for Len, another of the office crowd. We were off to Playland, a fairground within the Pacific National Exhibition; sort of like siting the Links Market inside the Glasgow Garden Festival and nailing it down. Lots of rollercoasters, pirate ships and centrifuges disguised as weird ’80s disco appliances.
Now, if the CN Tower and Duomo of Florence have taught me anything, it’s that I’m a part-time acrophobe. I’m fine on the ground (I mean, duh) but put me anywhere near a killer drop and I’m consumed by an inner conflict between the subconscious urge to jump off and conscious desire to get the hell away from the edge. To willingly jump onto a fairground ride is to give in to that insistent (and insane) inner voice, and I think that’s what freaks me out.
It occurs to me as I write this that it’s not the height I’m afraid of, it’s myself! Good God. Freud (and Doug) were right all along.
But I digress. Freud be damned; we were here to have fun.
Our first ride was a relatively tame and perhaps not entirely age-appropriate Wave Swinger, but we moved swiftly onto the big guns and jumped aboard the crushingly literal Wooden Roller Coaster.† This contraption was built and apparently last serviced in 1958, and in both operation and general aspect bore an uncanny resemblance to the rickety mine-cart chase sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We were “held in” by rattling iron restraints more appropriate to a stairlift than a rollercoaster, pulled up the first incline by some sort of clanking traction engine and then left to the tender mercies of gravity and 50-year-old wooden beams with all the structural cohesion of a house of cards. It was the first time I’d ever genuinely entertained the possibility that I might meet my end on a fairground ride.
Happily, it neither disintegrated beneath us nor catapulted us off the track. Buoyed up with foolish courage, we jumped on a variety of other potential death machines but I personally drew the line at the “Hellevator” (one of a number of biblically-themed rides such as “Hell’s Gate”, “Revelation” and “Homosexuality is Bad.” Okay, I made that last one up), a vertical tower of scaffolding which catapults 12 idiots skyward, the blast of compressed air drowning out their shouts of “How could I have been so stupid?”
We had a great time — despite the PTSD, I mean — and I ended the day the proud owner of both an untuneable miniature guitar won at whack-a-mole and a desperate phobia of antique fairground rides. Later that night we ate in the Seafood Cannery, a borderline posh restaurant curiously situated within the security cordon of Port Metro Vancouver, and retired to an anonymous sports bar in Burnaby for a nightcap. This led to some minor confusion; where a British bar will generally have a short space labelled “For used glasses only, no service here” and the rest of the bar is fair game, here the opposite was true: a couple of brass poles delineated the metre-wide portion dedicated to actually ordering drinks and the rest of was out of bounds. Perhaps fortunately, fatigue, inebriation and waitress service conspired to prevent us from pushing the bar’s territorial definitions.
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