Week 1 – Vancouver

Vancouver — By Ryan on January 15, 2010 11:05 pm

* Pictures are on my External drive which needs a power converter to work here in Europe – Stay tuned *

My adventure started out with a week long whirlwind of passion, romance and high stakes financial meetings in the beautiful city of Vancouver.

Although my flight left on the 9th of January I got my affairs in order extra early so that I could spend a week in Vancouver with a particularly special someone who captured my heart on a random bus ride back from Vancouver 3 weeks prior.  Well that and my good friend Nels in his networking brilliance lined up all sorts of investor meetings with people interested in SARF so there were those to attend to as well!

The week was exactly as it should have been, blissful, exciting and full of passion on all fronts.  The meetings all went exceptionally well as you would expect them to considering the nature of such an amazing project like SARF and the levels of passion that Nels and I have for it.  Speaking of which if you happen to know of anyone with connections to raise capital for a project like SARF you need to stop reading and start emailing me at ryan _at_ sarfstudios.com.

I tend not to take the bus so I ended up seeing a lot of the city as I was staying way up at 33rd which is a great hour walk into Vancouver through some unbelievably wealth neighbourhoods full of monstrosities for houses.  The days usually as amazingly as they do when you have someone you’re crazy about lying in your arms that you don’t want to let go of.  Meetings usually started around 10-12 and went for a few hours and then either walking back up to 33rd or meeting downtown for exploration in the city.  The evenings were domestic bliss with amazing meals being prepared in a beautiful apartment while being schooled on classical music from someone with a masters degree on the subject.  There is nothing sexier in this world than a woman that knows buckets more than you do on a particular subject.  My eyes were opened to say the least.   Every night seemed like something out of a dream, between seeing the inaugural performance of the National Broadcast Orchestra, chilling out at a wicked jazz club to some live music, to a long walk on the beach to curling up on a rainy night in front of the fireplace reading Calvin and Hobbes together, the week was Bliss, pure bliss.

Outside of that the meetings with Nels went terrific.  We met with probably 1/2 dozen people and had multiple skype conference calls over the course of the week and our energy was on fire.  We’ll definitely be seeing some action out of that week and I can’t wait to be taking SARF to the next level!

Alas the 9th came around far too quickly and before I knew it there I was at YVR ready to catch a flight out to The Big Apple.  But America wasn’t going to allow me in without a fight.  Coincidentally Newark airport had a huge security scare as someone wandered in through an exit the previous week, bypassed security and got all the way into the boarding areas. The dude wasn’t up to trouble, he just got lost but they had to seriously look at their security protocols and up everything.  The week prior to that we had the lovely nigerian terrorist try to blow himself up with a shoe bomb on the plane going to Detroit so add that to the usual state of heightened alert of the US and it equals some wonderful waits in security and not being allowed to take any carry-on luggage at all.  Joy!  I was about 8th or so in the lineup to get through security and it still took nearly 30 minutes to process us, I was talking to someone who got there plenty early(I was only an hour or so by the time I checked in) and she said it took hours and hours to process everyone.

As I was waiting in my terminal I noticed a girl I completely randomly met on the streets of Vancouver 2 days prior who was randomly taking the same flight to the same airport as I was at the same time.  And to top it all off, she was randomly(I use this word very tongue and cheek) sitting directly behind me on the plane.  So clearly I was meant to know this person better, I just have to find out why.  Pretty wild though.

The flight was uneventful, I didn’t sleep as much as I thought I would, in fact I hardly slept at all which is funny seeing as I didn’t sleep for a minute the night prior.  I do remember completely passing out at the beginning of the flight for 5-10 minutes.. I was doing something, can’t remember what, while we were taxing out on the runway and then suddenly I wake up and we are flying in the air.  So weird.. But the rest of the flight I just watched the Informant with Matt Daemon(interesting movie, some funny bits, crazy story), studying Spanish, typing up a dozen emails or so and then chilling to music.

But that about sums up the first week of this little adventure, more to come detailing Day 1 in NYC..

Tags: airport, flight, nels, passion, romance, sarf, Travel, vancouver