Upon arriving at the airport in Vancouver, I checked in through security and was almost busted for my crimes — I was told not to remove anything from my bag before it was sent through the scanners, and they flagged my red Osprey Tempest bag for further inspection. Specifically, the woman inspecting it opened up the compartment with my toiletries, took out the bag with the non-compliant 120 mL sunscreen bottle and the other sprays and gels, still in the resealable bag that Calgary security had given me. I thought the gig was up when she peered at it, but then she just put it back and handed me back the bag instead. I think it’s because that the sunscreen bottle doesn’t even mention the size now that I’ve removed the label, but there’s another bottle in there, my insect repellent, that looks like a bigger bottle but only contains 100 mL of liquid itself. So the other one keeps sneaking through by association. Anyway…

I spent an hour or so past domestic security walking up and down the gates available to me, going to the ends of the A, B, and C gate wings before settling on one nice little corner in the A wing. I ventured past a number of classics, including this fire hydrant for pets to relief themselves on:

And this travelator that was under repair and that I could peek into the guts of.

In terms of good spots to spend an overnight stay at the Vancouver Airport at, if one were just looking for a nice series of chairs without intervening armrests in a quiet area to nap in, I think any of the wings would work, and if one were looking chairs near power sockets, there were lots of those too. However, what I wanted to do was work on my blog at a proper table, and there were barely any actual tables with power sockets on/near them in the Domestic airside area of Vancouver Airport, except possibly this one single area I found by gate A6.

It has a table, multiple power sockets, soft (i.e. not metallic) chairs, and there are even lounge chairs nearby that one can stretch out on if one wanted to go to sleep instead.

It’s located over here, on the very tip of this wing of the airport, and actually faces east as well, so technically you can even see the sun as it rises! Well, actually likely not due to a couple of buildings in the way, but at least the glow of the morning sky is visible.

It is still an actual gate though, so at 1 am there was a bit of a disturbance as a late flight arrived and a chirpy gate attendant came by to greet everyone and ask if they have transfers they needed to catch. Over and over, for 10 minutes, as people trickled out of the plane.

But so very few people came by this part of the airport. There were maybe only ever 3 or 4 overnight passengers here at once in the whole entire visible area in the above pictures, though one of them was an annoying Indian woman who came right to the chairs behind me to try to sleep. I was listening to/watching a Twitch stream, ragesaq‘s specifically, over the Vancouver Airport WiFi, and although it was at a low volume, it was still audible and playing out loud. I hope she enjoyed the sound of his gunshots and gameplay commentary all through the night. I did not bother turning it down (and she did not ask me to) because it was running at 15% volume from my laptop in the first place so it was plenty soft already, but even this specific airport lobby area was so big, and I was here first — why specifically come so close to me to try to sleep? I realized after though that maybe it was for passive security.

Her presence didn’t annoy me or anything though, until she woke up after that litany of passengers paraded through the area. She then started a video call with her family or something and proceeded to yap in Indian at the top of her lungs for about 15-20 minutes, coming even closer to my table to plug her phone into one of the power cords too (when there were also other power cord poles all around the expansive lobby above). I shrugged and left my Twitch stream on, and after 15-20 minutes or so, sneezing a couple of times very loudly, in a direction away from her but making no effort to conceal it. Finally she took the hint and left the area. She was so loud and had so little filter on her voice though, that even when she was past the third central pillar in the above picture, beyond the final row of chairs visible from my vantage point, I could STILL hear her talking on her video call.

Oh well. Overall I did spend a productive evening working on the blog, though I also did just slump forward a bit and lay my head on my comfortable red Osprey Tempest bag (I should get a sponsorship from them, I’ve now mentioned the bag 3 times in 2 blog posts) for a quick power nap about halfway through. I also changed out most of my clothes while there (by slipping on new clothes and then removing the old clothes from under) and also changed out of my hiking boots into those slippers that I had bought in Canmore, so those slippers I was forced to buy did come into play and made my night much more comfortable as well. However, the temperature here definitely did get a bit chilly during the night, so I both put on long pants as well as a long-sleeved cardigan fairly early on, and then everything was fine afterwards. No one came by to try to chase me off or anything. Westjet attendants came by to open one of the nearby A-gates at 5 am, and I packed up and left soon after to try to find my actual gate for my 7:30 am flight since there was no listed gate yet when I passed security last night.

While I did not know what gate the outgoing Flair flight was going to be when I passed security last night, I did know that the flight was going into be in the B-wing of the domestic terminal because there were five other Flair Airlines domestic flights that did have gates when I looked at the departure screens, and they were all the in B-wing. I didn’t find a good table with power when I looked last night, but I actually did find some when I went to the gate today. I don’t remember exactly which gate this was next to, it was somewhere in the B18-B26 wing, but these would technically have worked as well:

The chairs are wooden instead of leather though, and the tables are narrower, so it would not have been as good an experience. But it would probably have been a much busier area relatively speaking, as it’s a more central location, and this could be considered both a good and bad thing. There were also these seats nearby, and these actually seem quite nice due to the power cord, although they lack a table.

So this area would definitely have been a possible location for whiling the night away at as well.

When we boarded the plane, I was seated right at the back of the plane due to an checking in too early, since they fill the plane from the back to the front, but at least I was randomly assigned an aisle seat again. I was doubly thankful for this because I was seated next to a Chinese woman in the middle seat who was sniffling and snorting the entire flight from being sick, though at least she was wearing a mask. The person in the window seat was her friend as well. Both of them also were playing Chinese Rednote (I think) videos out loud and got scolded by a flight attendant who told them to not do that and to buy earphones if they needed to. When he left, the two Chinese women just started doing it again though. These are the kind of idiots who give other Chinese people a bad name. Thankfully they both eventually stopped once we were in the air and they didn’t have an Internet connection any more.

The airplane lifted off the Vancouver runway at 7:50 am and landed on the Calgary runway at 9:50 am local time, so from wheel up to down wheel it took almost exactly an hour. With coasting and stuff there were another 20 or so minutes added. Because I had an aisle seat, I was trying to lean out of my seat to try to not get close to the germ factory in the middle seat as much as possible, and once the plane arrived at its destination gate after landing, I immediately stood up and got away from them long before the plane doors were opened.

I took the bus route 300 away from the Airport to the downtown area for the usual $3.80 fee, after noting Calgary’s version of the pet relief area during the 20 minute wait for the bus:

Once I reached the downtown area, I started to head south toward the Lilac Festival, the Calgary event that I was going to visit to round off my tour, and the reason that I had come here before taking a bus back to Edmonton, instead of taking a direct flight back from Vancouver to Edmonton. Along the way, I passed a store named Singapore Sam’s, and I remembered visiting this store during my visit to Calgary for the Stampede back in 2021, due to its name.

Instead of ordering takeout, I ate there this time, going for a combo dish featuring Shanghai Noodles with Beef and Mixed Vegetables, with the combo part adding on a bonus bowl of wonton soup, fried rice, and one spring roll. It looked like this:

And was terrible, absolutely terrible. To my future self, if you come across this entry while thinking about eating here like how I looked up that Calgary Stampede entry today, don’t do it. Eat somewhere else. It was very filling though, I’ll give them that.

While I was eating there, someone came in to look for the owner of a truck that was parked outside and blocking his car from being able to leave his parking lot. The perpetrator wasn’t in the restaurant though, and the irate owner finally found the person in another of the nearby stores. After a brief scolding, the other driver drove off with his truck.

Finally, I reached the Lilac Festival. I thought this would be just a three or four street event, and the hour and a half or so of time that I alloted to it would be far more than enough to browse through all of this. Nope! This event was amazingly huge, and stretched over at least 15 city blocks, possibly more, centered around the 17th Avenue/4th Street SW intersection and stretching out in all four directions from there. It was also really, really crowded, with a sea of humanity and dogs flowing in both directions on every street at a slow, languid pace. Most of the pictures I took represent this — they were mostly just of a bunch of people walking around.