Thursday morning, July 2, we headed to Vancouver, BC, Canada, for the AA International Convention that happens every 5 years. And since 2020’s was cancelled for obvious reasons, this is the first in 10 years. I’ve never been and neither had Ash. We’re not really big conference people however neither of us had been to Vancouver in a long time and it seemed like a good excuse to get there.

We had an 8:15am flight out of Sacramento to Seattle.

Ash knows a lot about planes – can tell from looking at it if it’s a Boeing or Airbus, the model, how big it is, all kinds of details I’m frankly not interested in. Will it get me there safely? I’m good. But Mark got into it with him, and it was fun to watch them be so excited about what they were watching.

The flight to Vancouver from Seattle is just about 45 minutes – we were delayed on the tarmac about that long it seemed  – but got there safely. We grabbed bags and got a rental and made our way downtown to a condo Ash had managed to snag literally as we were boarding. Long story short: the host of our original booking gave it to someone else, we learned as we were getting ready to board. Ash magically found something – we learned later the guest who was booked pushed their stay out to 7/8 some minutes before – so we would have a place to go when we landed after all. Greg was already waiting to get into the other place so we sent him the info and he was already there when we got there.

We pretty much just dropped our bags and talked about our approach to the rest of the day. We parked the car in the condo garage – an adventure in itself – and made our way out. The left photo is us taking the elevator back up to street level. On the right. Ash and Mark in front of a fun Indian place that had a beautiful outdoor area.

From there we took a right and it was a straight walk through downtown to the water with the Convention Center a bit on our right once we got there.

Everything here is gorgeous. The architecture is fun and interesting, the city is super clean, everyone is very friendly. Lots of interesting shops and eateries and extremely diverse. We can easily see spending a couple of months here at some point.

We were headed to the opening meeting of GALAA – Gays and Lesbians of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is a group like any group, associated with the General Service Office in NYC, which supports the global community in a variety of ways. They planned their own agenda which runs alongside the Convention schedule which gives the community alternatives in a wide variety of social things, mostly which we are going to pass on. But we wanted to go to the opening meeting which served as both a welcome and was also conducted as a regular AA meeting with 4 speakers – all terrific.

We got there just after 5pm for a 6pm start and are So Glad we did. We managed to snag front row seats and that was beneficial. Although it was a huge room, the people kept coming. Due to the principle of anonymity photos are discouraged and we respected that. But I do wish I could’ve gotten a couple of photos to capture the gathering. After, we estimated there was some 1200-1500 folks at that meeting. Standing room only doesn’t begin to cut it. Ash said he counted 72 people sitting on the floor in front of us. The energy was incredible, and it was a great start to the weekend.

And we ran into lots of people we knew, especially Ash, which of course happens to him everywhere it goes it seems. But we might as well of been in the Castro. I bet he introduced me to 20 people that I hadn’t met before, so along with the ones we all knew it was a good 30-40 folks – and there are still some we know are here who we haven’t seen yet. So that’s fun (and exhausting if you’re me…).

But afterwards, we were done. There was a convention block party happening right outside the convention center after the meeting, but we were already ready to get away from all the people! Greg navigated us back to a place he’d already been to twice which happened to be close to our condo.

The waiter on the far left offered to take our photo after I had gotten up to take one of us. He started with a landscape shot before switching to portrait, which led to comments about going both ways, which fit right into the tone of the day as I’ll let you imagine. But that’s what we’re laughing about in the 2nd pic.

Random leftover photos of the city. It’s such a beautiful place, we are looking forward to our time here.

We stopped for groceries on our way back home and called it a night. I uploaded the photos for this and was in bed about 11:45pm, long after everyone else.

Today is a walking tour in the morning and the big opening meeting of the convention in the evening – 30k+ people in a stadium. Should be interesting!