After quick breakfast at Joe’s Grill, we walked down to Spokes at Denman at W. Georgia where we rented some bikes for the day, they weren’t the greatest…

Sean’s bike is being awesome (again.)

… I had warned Sarah that we (Sean and I) were going to complain every 5 minutes about the suckiness of the bikes.

Despite the threat of rain, we rode into Stanley Park – yes, it was mostly open and quite a wonderful ride. The weather cleared up as the afternoon wore on too.
_{(don’t forget to follow along using my handy Google Map!)}

Brockton Point Totem Poles

Bikes – the new mechanical horse?

Beaver Lake – Can you spot the turtle?

That tree has over 1800 rings – Sarah has just one…

I suspect by this point I was very close to heat- or sun-stroke, and I’d already fixed one customer’s Tomcat failure, so we called it an afternoon and headed back to the hotel to cool off and get ready for the UFie meet. (Felt 100% better after getting out of the sun and taking a shower. I’m sure I smelled 100% better too 😉
Grabbed a Hybrid cab with Yohimbe as we headed for Vietnamese Noodle to meet up with Dark, Tatertots, Shminux and the infamous Illiad.
Since Tanya (Tatertots) and Andre (Dark) were getting married the next day (ostensively the reason for the whole trip), and the owner of the restaurant knew them, he was passing out ‘poppers’ for good luck and celebration.

How to use a popper…

Less than 24 hours until these two are married!

We had a lot of fun, the food was great, stories were told. Well, attempted to be told… There was a moment when conversation slowed, so I recalled that Illiad had mentioned (on #SPORKS) that he had a story to tell us, we all sat there for a moment trying to remember what it was. Since no one could remember, I had to go log diving, but the pertinent log of that moment wasn’t on my laptop, so I would have to SSH into my desktop machine; there wasn’t any open WiFi, and I haven’t yet setup my Treo to work with my MacBrook Pro, so I sought André’s Moto Razr and commenced swapping SIM while JD narrated…

“If there was anything to be known as geek sex”, as he nodded towards Andre and I eviscerating our various mobile phone and exchange SIMs, “this is what it would be like; but the sound, it’d be more like…” He then proceeded to make a sound, an emanation that I believe no human has produced, or ever even heard before that moment… And I lost it:

Myke: Now available in Red.

About two minutes later, I managed to come back up for air and asked, “Do we really need to find those logs anymore?”
Too bad for Sarah, she was in the bathroom for the whole scene. Somehow, I kinda wish I’d been there too.

Afterwards, Shminux kindly drove us back to our hotel. Along the way, I pointed out that the ‘Defrost’ setting in his Pontiac Vibe enagages the air-conditioning, and perhaps this explains his poor fuel-economy. (Days later he confirmed that his mileage is getting better.)

At this point, I’d thought were we done for the evening, but apparently Sean was getting tired of the impracticality of lugging around his Olympus (E500?) DSLR and all it’s associated glass, and that he really wanted a pocketable camera. So at about 10:30PM we head for the nearby London Drugs (pharmacy cum Walmart.) For the next hour I pitched the Canon SD800IS to Sean and some random guy from Egypt. (I’d given my mother one for her birthday after extensive research. It is an excellent pocket camera but it does have a $450 pricetag.) More than once, the salesgirl, Pamela IIRC, offered me a job hawking cameras. T’was rather amusing, and I was all warmed up for geeking from the UFie meet. Sean did end up picking up the camera, and since then has been quite happy with it.

We apparently weren’t done yet – we got some dessert at Mom’s over on Denman.

Finally, around midnight, we called it a day. And what a day it was!

_{Photo credits/post-processing to Shminux and Stef}