Hockey Night in Canada

This Saturday the gang and I went to see a hockey game in Vancouver. It was the Canucks vs the Red Wings. Since there were eight of us we decided a road trip was in order. And to make this a proper road trip, we even had a "it's just rental" moment. The hotel had an underground garage for us to park in. The height level of the garage was 6 feet 5 inches. The problem is the van was 6 feet 6 inches. Jim managed to scraped the top of the van. It was a white van so the scraped off paint did not show up, so returning the van should not be an issue.

We walked around downtown Vancouver in the rain. Had a great time, ate at a Greek restaurant for Liner (or is that Dunch). We stopped at this strange underground mall on the way back to the hotel. It was in the process of being remodeled, but was still pretty upscale. It was also pretty much all below street level.


As you can see, we had OK seats. The view was good but kind of high up. This picture was taken during the the player warm-up.

While this one was take during the first period.

Everybody loves the Zamboni. Not sure why, but they do. There is scientific studies that prove it. I'm sure that it was good old American grant money that was spent studying things that everyone knows.

Something I was not prepared for - Flying Killer Whale!!! I saw Orca, those thing are scary. And now they can fly and drop movie passes to "Blades of Steel"
The crowd was fairly rowdy. There was an problem during the second period when someone above us was throwing things at two Red Wing fans that were below us. Even after they were asked to stop the throwing continued, so they through a beer at the loudest group of fans. These fans of course returned the favor. This beer was not as thrown as well and managed to get some on us. There was a shouting match that ended up with ejections on both sides. The problem was that they apparently did not take the tickets of ejected parties because the Canucks fans were back by the third period laughing about the security. Thankfully no beer more beer was flying the rest of the game.

The final score of the game was 4-1 Canucks. The Red Wings fans among us felt this was because the Red Wings were sitting all of their stars so the they would be rested for upcoming conference games. I don't know if that is true, but I do know that the Canucks took them to school.

After the game, we went back to the hotel and ordered pizza and pasta. We took the food up the activity room were we could all comfortably hang.

I may not have mentioned that Saturday was St. Patrick's Day. Jim (2.0) has on his 101 in 1001 day list to drink a green beer on St. Patrick's Day. So the Jims, Jason (Duece) and I went looking for some green beer. On our way we found the results of a pretty spectacular accident. Unfortunately my pictures did not turn out so you will have to deal with my less than thousand word description. Basically a white SUV crashed in to a parked black SUV and then continued on in to a shop window. The black SUV was hit so hard that it pivoted 90 degrees.

I was very impressed at the crowds at the bars and pubs in downtown Vancouver. It made sense that all of the Irish pubs would have a long wait to get in, but all of the bars seemed to have a 30 minute wait to get in. Well at least for us normal folk. We did see a professionally dressed lady spit and slap in the face of a bouncer.

We basically gave up on finding the beer and were heading back when we found an off the beaten path bar, that was closing in 30 minutes but it did have green beer.

As you can tell Jim likes to bogart the alcohol.

Jim did get his green beer. I never did get a good explanation for why he had a crayon behind his ear. I am thinking he is hoping that we would eat at another restaurant with paper on the table like the Greek restaurant we had Linner at.