metroPlanet

I got several notes regarding yesterday's picture. I wondered if I could find more information about the Skytrain on the net. I did. Find Columbia Station on the system map as that's where this apartment is. Here's a link:

metroPlanet > America > Canada > British Columbia > Vancouver - Skytrain [Link Expired]

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And here's what Don said in response to the link:

. . . I now know what I will do as a retiree. Go from city to city spending days, weeks or months riding their Metro systems. Just think of all the people I could chat to, used clothing stores and cheap out-of-the-way restaurants I could find.

Like my aunt and uncle, who had never been anywhere, woke up one morning and decided to drive to the Pacific Ocean and left home two hours later and returned two months later. And they did something similar each summer for the next ten years. No particular plan. Just started driving. And took normal roads and ended up in out-of-the-way places and visited things like the world's largest hub cap collection. And they met dozens of people and then the ensuing years would go and visit these people. For example, they were sitting in a restaurant in some place (let's say Humboldt, Nebraska) and struck up a conversation with another retired couple who were on their way to visit their daughter in some place (let's say Fargo, North Dakota), so my Aunt and Uncle decided to follow them and by the time they arrived, they had become friends enough to be invited over several times to the daughter's house. These people were from (let's say Northern Oklahoma), so the following year, my Aunt and Uncle drove to Oklahoma to visit these people. And the four of them drove to the Grand Canyon.

Many times they slept in their old car at a rest area, (one time their old car died and they bought an even older car to finish the trip), sponge-bathed in the restroom, set up a gas cylinder out of the trunk of the car at a picnic table and made breakfast, and off they went. Most of the time they bought baloney, hot dogs and beans and tuna fish, etc. in local grocery stores and made lunch and/or dinner and ate in the car or beside the road. About every third afternoon they'd check into a motel for 12 hours to rest up and replenish and take baths and do laundry. They'd be on the road for two months and stay only about 20 nights in motels and eat about 30 meals in restaurants. They'd come home after 2 months with some of their social security checks, of $600 a month combined, left over! With a car full of memorabilia and scrap book full of post cards and napkins and motel brochures and things like a stone from the Grand Canyon or a tulip bulb or clipping from somebody's flower bed or an old mayonnaise jar of water from Salt Lake or the Mississippi River. And each year they'd start earlier and come back later; no Winnebago, not even AAA. And each week they'd make a person-to-person call to themselves to one of their children back home to let them know they were OK. The first year they didn't even do that. They just sent post cards.