• Taking a limo in from the airport and watching the glass-skyscrapers get closer
• Eating sushi on Davie
• Hiring bikes at the edge of Stanley Park to ride to Beaver Lake then going to Second Beach for a swim and booing Steve Balmer’s yacht in the bay
• Playing volleyball at Sunset Beach as like, er, the sun sets
• Evening drinks in our apartment, watching the Vancouver cats walk along the balcony rails, eleven floors up
• Chilling in Van Dusen Gardens with hot-dogs and a beer
• Heading out to the University of British Columbia to see the Museum of Anthropology and use the outdoor pool with the 7-metre diving board
• Stopping off at the beach on the way back (see above)
• Driving a 4×4 up to Whistler so the lads can don body armour and take the adapted ski-lifts then hurtle downhill on mid-range mountain bikes
• Hurtling back down south to Vancouver in-and-out of the road-works preparing the highway for the Winter Olympics
• Missing out on buying rare 7” vinyl such as Toddla T’s remix of Roisin Murphy’s “You know me better” and Mozza’s “First of the gang to die”. Damn
• Waiting for the man by the juke-box in that pub…
• Dining at the Tapas-tree, the last restaurant as you head west on Robson
• Riding round Stanley Park at 4am in a Mustang with the top down, still deaf from going to that club in Gastown where everyone communicated by sign-language
• Buying jeans, t-shirts and boxers on Robson
• Wondering when that enormous pile of yellow sulphur across the bay will go down
• Wishing we didn’t have to go home