Thirty Years Ago in New West

Thirty years ago, landing in British Columbia did not involve swiping through digital listings or cross-referencing street views on a phone screen. We touched down in 1996 fresh from the heat of Dubai, leaving behind tax-free contracts and shipping our entire, meager household across the ocean under the name of one of Jay’s penpals. Interestingly, our temporary baseline was Vancouver's Patricia Hotel on Hastings; we'd seen it was cheap in a BC accommodation magazine and telephoned from overseas for a reservation,  The real task was finding an anchor before the container docked.

The search method was straightforward. We bought tickets, climbed aboard the SkyTrain, and treated the elevated tracks as our personal reconnaissance platform across the Lower Mainland. There was a single line that ended in Surrey.  To narrow the hunt, we used a primitive outfit found in the newspaper classifieds that churned out printed address sheets of available rentals. We unfolded that tractor-feed, dot-matrix printed list on the train to see where we might head. If a neighbourhood sat beyond walking distance of a station, it was crossed off. That transit spine carried us straight into New Westminster. The station back then bore no resemblance to the massive shopping concourse and condo complex that encases it today; it was raw Expo 86 concrete, open air, and bare platforms overlooking industrial tracks and quiet streets. The printed list led us just a short walk over to a rental tower at 838 Agnes Street, where we secured unit 903.

It was basic, functional, and entirely ours. For two years, that coordinate served as the engine room for setting up life here, initial teaching terms at Pitman, and getting used to West Coast rain after years in the desert. Looking at these two photographs from 1996, the view outside tells the real story. The one above looks out from the ninth-floor balcony toward the open expanse of the New Westminster station area before modern development swallowed the sky, while the other peeks from the bedroom between neighbouring towers toward the grey ribbon of the Fraser River. It was our first perch in the Royal City, but thirty years later, that river remains our constant anchor, now from the other end of downtown on Carnarvon Street.

Where the River Squeezes and History Settles

Looking down from the balcony on Carnarvon Street, the river feels surprisingly hemmed in. From the foot of Sixth Street across to the quiet stretch of park off Tannery Road in Surrey, the water spans barely over five hundred metres bank to bank. The bluff's steep elevation deceives the eye, compressing that half-kilometre gap until the opposing shoreline looks almost within arm's reach. The water feels compressed. Bulkheads, wharves, and industrial docks funnel the Fraser into a tight, muscular throat. That urban pinch only magnifies the raw power moving through it, draining a quarter of British Columbia from a watershed larger than the whole of Great Britain. Even here, thirty-five kilometres inland from the ocean, the Pacific pushes back with a heavy twice-daily tide, driving saltwater beneath an average outgoing torrent of thirty-five hundred cubic metres of silt every second.

That relentless volume makes it an irreplaceable biological artery. Millions of returning wild salmon (chinook, sockeye, coho, pink, and chum) funnel through this narrow gap every year, fighting their way past our pier toward interior spawning beds that can lie more than a thousand kilometres upstream near the Rocky Mountains. Down in the murky sediment below the shipping channel, prehistoric white sturgeon continue to patrol the riverbed, some living over a century and growing several metres in length. The river never stops working.

Indigenous communities lived and fished along this waterway for thousands of years, respecting both the dangerous current and the massive salmon runs it carried. When outside explorers finally tried navigating it by boat, they quickly learned the hard way that the churning canyons upstream were nearly suicidal to travel. Then came the 1858 gold rush. Thousands of miners poured in practically overnight, turning this violent river into the only practical supply highway into the interior. A permanent settlement had to be established quickly near the river mouth to collect taxes, maintain law, and guard the border.

The surveyors chose this exact spot because of its geography. Flatter ground farther upstream was rejected because it sat low and defenseless. This north bluff offered high ground with a clear view down the channel, backed by deep water where ocean ships could tie up right against the bank. The military blasted through massive timber to lay out the steep hillside streets we walk today. Because this was the narrowest practical place to cross the lower river, that decision eventually funnelled the current three major bridges straight into downtown. Even after the political capital was shifted over to Vancouver Island a few years later, the riverfront stayed busy. The docks, timber mills, and railways remained right here because the physical geography made sense.

Living alongside this rushing channel for three decades has never dimmed our appreciation of its quiet majesty nor its daily importance. The light still catches the silty boils in unexpected ways at dusk, and the deep horn of an outbound tug continues to command our attention as it clears the bridge pilings. Skylines grow taller, seasons cycle through, and shipping schedules shift, but the brown water keeps paying the freight.

Voting Twice in the Royal City

We marked our ballots early last weekend for the municipal vote, and the numbers finally surfaced last night. Yet thanks to an ill-timed gamble by the ruling provincial party, an early general election arrived almost immediately on its heels. That overlap produced an unbearable din of competing campaign signs and lawn rhetoric, making it far harder for individual candidates to cut through the local static. The upside to this political clutter was purely logistical. It allowed us to turn out early once again today and cast our ballots for the province of British Columbia.

We caught the local bus two stops up 6th Street and joined the tiny queue outside the New Westminster Armoury. Completed in 1895, the hall stands out as a genuine rarity among Canadian drill halls, which were almost universally built from heavy stone or brick. This facility was framed and sided entirely in regional timber, flanked by square towers with distinctive flared mansard roofs. Miraculously, the massive structure survived the Great Fire of 1898 that flattened downtown New Westminster, serving as emergency shelter for hundreds left homeless by the blaze. Wood outlasted the brick. Today it remains an active wooden military post, home to The Royal Westminster Regiment. Rounding toward the rear of the property, we caught sight of fresh recruits sorting gear and running through equipment checks in preparation for weekend exercises or upcoming deployment.

The line moved with crisp military efficiency. We were in and out of the drill floor within a couple of minutes, leaving behind the gratifying sensation of having our civic chores tidy and squared away. Rather than boarding transit for the return, we drifted homeward on foot through Tipperary Park, enjoying the quiet green slope before turning down 4th Street toward our building. These photographs offer a modest visual log of our morning loop through the neighborhood.

Big Crowds in Our Little Uptown

Jay and I headed up to uptown New Westminster around 4:00 this afternoon for BC Recovery Day. Leaving the car behind was an easy call. Sixth Street was completely blocked off to traffic, turning any thought of parking into pure fantasy. The buses were rerouted as expected, meaning we stood at the stop an extra ten minutes, but taking transit saved us the headache of crawling through diversions

We usually miss this event entirely. It lands right around Jay’s birthday in September, a time of year when we are almost always away on a trip. Being home to actually catch it this year made the sheer scale of the thing obvious. They were anticipating crowds upwards of 40,000 people. Considering New Westminster only has around 85,000 residents, having half the equivalent city’s population in a six-block stretch of Uptown is quite something. 

What started out rather modestly back in 2012 as part of the broader national Recovery Day movement has morphed into one of the largest mental health and addiction recovery events in the world. Over the past decade and a half, it expanded from a modest grassroots gathering into a massive, street festival packed with two hundred community booths, artisans, food trucks, and thousands of people out celebrating hope and community.

 

The highlight of the afternoon was catching Canadian icon Jann Arden on the main stage at 5:00 pm. She drew a dense crowd and sounded great out in the open air.

It is always satisfying to see New West stage events of this caliber and draw people in from all across the Lower Mainland. The city’s distinct advantage has always been its compact size right in the middle of the region. When something takes over our uptown, the entire community feels alive with it.

From Industrial Scars to Pier Park: Our Riverfront's Redemption

Stepping through Westminster Pier Park this morning from the far edge of downtown, it’s almost comical to recall what greeted us when we moved to New Westminster in 1996. Back then, civic planning apparently meant paving over old industrial wreckage and declaring it "waterfront parking." People bravely parked cars atop vast stretches of black asphalt perched precariously over rotting creosote pilings, inhaled the faint bouquet of decades-old hydrocarbons, and tried not to think about the murky depths of the Fraser below.  Large sections were fenced off completely and left to decay.

A century earlier, the real estate wasn't quiet parking but rather a sensory assault of Victorian capitalism. Commercial canning along the river took off in the 1870s after Alexander Ewen and his syndicate proved British consumers would eagerly devour Fraser River sockeye shipped halfway across the globe in one-pound tins. By 1876, Ewen built directly on the New West waterfront, and by the 1890s the pier footprint was packed with four separate canneries operating cheek-by-jowl with feed mills and creameries. Thousands of tons of salmon, predominantly prized sockeye, alongside chinook, coho, and chum, were steam-cooked in iron retorts, sealed, and stamped for export.  Machine shops blithely swept oily metal shavings straight through floor-holes into the river.

The Great Fire of 1898 leveled the cannery district, eventually making way for Pacific Coast Terminals and decades of heavy shipping before the whole mess surrendered to neglect and asphalt. Today, post-remediation, the contrast is night and day: native grasses, timber boardwalks, and festival lawns where cannery entrails and commuter sedans used to roast in the sun. It took New West about 130 years to figure out that the riverfront is far better suited for humans with ice cream than tin cans and rusty mufflers, but we got there eventually.

Admiring a Bentwood Eagle

A visit to the thrift shop produced an unexpected encounter on the shelves: a small oval container fashioned from thin wood veneer, its lid carrying a crisp, hand-painted First Nations eagle in traditional black, red, and white formline. It had an unmistakable presence that commanded attention. I picked it up and carried it through the store, though the price tag was so negligible that bringing only the box to the cash register felt almost improper. To appease the retail ledger and justify the transaction, I circled the aisles until I finally settled on a shirt to buy alongside it. The clothing was mere camouflage; the little box was the real acquisition.

I discovered it is called a bentwood box and is named for the woodworking technique used to create the container itself.  Rather than carving a hollow from a solid log or fastening multiple flat pieces together at sharp angles, thin strips of wood are steamed or soaked until pliable, then bent around a mould into smooth, curved shapes to form the oval rim and walls.  On the West Coast, bentwood boxes are a celebrated Indigenous tradition, masterfully crafted from a single cedar plank that is grooved, steamed, bent into four sides, and pegged together. For smaller market crafts and shaker-style oval boxes like this one, thin veneer is steamed and overlapped to make a lightweight, seamless container.

Tucked inside was an original cardstock slip identifying the artist as Una-Ann of the Tahltan First Nation, noting the Eagle as a representation of wisdom, strength, and foresight. Beneath the text was a local 604 telephone number and an old Hotmail address.

A search online filled in the wider biographical canvas. Una-Ann spent twenty-five years working as an Indigenous support worker in the Langley School District, dedicating a major chapter of her career to secondary students before retiring in 2019. Rather than slowing down, at age sixty-six she enrolled in the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art in Terrace to further advance her carving and traditional formline practice.

The physical ephemera dates this container back roughly twenty years, hailing from the Lower Mainland artisan market circuits of the early 2000s. Twenty years is barely a footnote in historical time, but in an individual human life, it is a substantial expanse. It represents the arc of an entire teaching career, generations of students passing through classrooms, and the gradual obsolescence of early digital tools. Yet through all that accumulated living, the painted veneer remained unchanged, patiently preserving a single afternoon's work until it was rescued from a crowded shelf.

I love it. I plan to send a message out to that vintage Hotmail address. Whether the note reaches an active inbox or bounces silently into the digital ether, it feels right to offer a simple word of thanks to the artist whose handiwork now decorates our coffee table.

Down the Inside Passage

Our final day on board was spent entirely at sea, cruising southbound through the Inside Passage. A soft mist hung over the water for stretches, but it was certainly not without views, giving us plenty of intermittent glimpses of the coast throughout the day. Thanks to modern satellite navigation systems, the ship glided quietly along without needing a single blast from a foghorn. I kept track of our exact progress down the channel using the blue GPS dot on Google Maps, watching our steady course home.

Having a full sea day at the tail end of a voyage is a wonderful way to close out the trip before we pull into the cruise terminal in downtown Vancouver tomorrow. It creates a comfortable buffer, letting the entire week settle in before stepping off the ship. We enjoyed a relaxed final lunch on board and packed up our stateroom at our leisure, enjoying these last peaceful hours on the water.

I often think about how very lucky I am. With Jay, we can plan and execute just about any travel itinerary we can envision. This cruise popped up as a last minute chance, and I feel so deeply appreciative that we were able to take up the unexpected voyage.

The Purely Cash Contingency

Living on an active tectonic plate along the West Coast changes how one must look at emergency preparedness. Most regional advice focuses heavily on the standard accumulation of canned rations and emergency supplies, but a critical logistical blind spot exists for most households. Jay and I have completely relied on electronic transactions for the entirety of our daily lives for decades now. I carry a solitary, folded twenty dollar bill in my wallet as a symbolic relic, but the rest of our financial footprint is entirely digital. I really didn't remember who is on a few of our Canadian bank notes.  

Few people in modern society actually envision a total disruption to that seamless daily routine. It is a fragile baseline. If a significant seismic event interferes with the local electrical grid, the immediate consequence will be the total disappearance of ATMs and point-of-sale terminals. Cash becomes the only viable currency when the digital architecture fails.

I had set aside a dedicated, little cash stash for just such a circumstance a while back. That emergency fund sits securely inside a hidden, fireproof box in the apartment alongside our vital personal papers. However, I recently took a closer look and realized a major flaw in the makeup of the bills. What earthly good is a hundred dollar note going to be when one is trying to purchase basic necessities like broccoli and carrots from a local vendor? In a real crisis, merchant registers are going to run out of small bills within hours.

I visited our uptown bank branch this morning to systematically break down those large denominations into a beautifully distributed stack of highly usable smaller bills. The teller probably thought I was running a highly suspicious garage sale. Thanks to this bout of financial micro-management, I feel like a wonderfully dutiful, silver-haired Boy Scout. If the "Big One" finally hits the coast, I might be sitting in the dark, but at least I possess the exact change required to bribe my way onto a outbound ferry or buy a single, 4-liter jug of whole milk.

Our Visit to the New Lab

Today, Jay and I went uptown to the new LifeLabs location on Sixth Street to get our baseline bloodwork done. This was our first time visiting the "new digs," which recently replaced their old spot over on Fifth Avenue.

I have to say, the new location is a significant improvement for overall access. The space is larger and the layout is much more functional. While the old clinic was definitely inconvenient to get to, it did have a view. However, this new spot certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. I snapped a photo right from the lab chair, enjoying a surprisingly great peek out over the uptown high-rises and bustling 6th Street below.

One of the tricks to navigating the medical system here is knowing when to plan ahead. We had the foresight to book our appointments online in advance, which meant our wait time was a fraction of what it would have been if we had just walked in. The waiting area is always full of folks who didn't book ahead, resigned to a lengthened bout of sitting.

It got me thinking about how general medicine actually functions here in Canada, and specifically in British Columbia. To an outsider, the system might seem complex, but it operates on a very direct sequence. It all starts with the Family Doctor, or a walk-in clinic for anyone not lucky enough to have a dedicated GP. The doctor acts as the gatekeeper. They issue the requisition for the lab work, which in BC is primarily handled by private entities like LifeLabs that operate under the provincial health umbrella.

Once the requisition is issued, a patient simply gets their blood drawn, and the results are routed directly back to the doctor. Thanks to modern provincial portals, I can log in later today and see my own numbers the moment they are finalized. It is a hybrid system of publicly funded care delivered through a mix of private labs and independent physician practices. When it works smoothly, as it did today with our booked appointments at the new Sixth Street clinic, it is a remarkably efficient machine.

We Canadians certainly love to complain about our medical system, but one only has to look at places where healthcare is entirely privatized to appreciate what we have. In those models designed for moneymaking, the level of care received is entirely dependent on a person's wallet, leaving far too many folks with unequal treatment or abandoned by the wayside completely. Furthermore, there is a massive, hidden financial burden in those systems just to maintain the competing, redundant, and often poorly organized infrastructure required simply to keep the billing departments running. It might not be perfect here, but our single-payer baseline consistently delivers better overall outcomes than the wild west of the completely for-profit healthcare industry.

Fireplace or Barbecue?

 

It is mid-May. We had switched off the gas fireplace a while back; however, now that the long weekend in Canada is nearly here, I felt the need to light it again. This morning the temperature felt cold and it's still only 9°C (48°F) and remains overcast and rainy. Tonight the temperature will drop just a couple of degrees lower, but the sun is not expected to appear at all until tomorrow morning. 

Yet, get ready to fire up the barbecue because Victoria Day arrives on Monday, May 18th, as a statutory holiday that guarantees a three-day weekend across British Columbia! Originally established way back in 1845 to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday, this historic Monday became a fixed, nationwide holiday by an act of the Parliament of Canada in 1901 following her passing. It has happily transformed into Canada’s undisputed, unofficial kickoff to the summer season, especially after 1952, when the government smartly decreed it would always fall on the Monday preceding May 25th. 

This paid day off is officially celebrated in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories. In these regions, it remains the cherished long weekend where Canadians enthusiastically dust off the patio cushions, unpack the camping gear, and boldly embrace the Great Outdoors to welcome the warm weather ahead. This makes it the absolute perfect excuse to settle in, relax, and celebrate a joyful start of the summer roadmap in style, even though we will most likely require umbrellas again in 2026.

The Shifting Skyline from the Royal City

It is fascinating to look out from our vantage point in New Westminster and realize how much the landscape has evolved since Jay and I first settled here. My lone photo of the day captures a reality that would have been unrecognizable a decade or two ago. Where there is now a dense phalanx of glass and steel stretching toward the clouds, there used to be open air and a clear line of sight.

Back then, the horizon belonged to Mt. Baker down in Washington State. Its snowy peak was a constant, majestic companion to our morning coffee. Today, those towers have claimed that particular piece of the sky, effectively editing the volcano out of our daily view.

It’s not a point of sadness, though; rather, it's just the natural rhythm of urban development in a corner of the world that refuses to stand still. We’re watching a massive demographic shift in real-time. Just across the water, Surrey is growing at such a clip that it is projected to surpass the population of Vancouver proper in the very near future.

New Westminster remains our home base, but the view is certainly getting more crowded. It’s a bit like watching a child grow up; you don't always notice the height increase day-to-day until you look at an old photograph and realize the world looks entirely different.

May the 4th Be With You

For the photo above, I was standing by the Fourth Street entrance to the New Westminster downtown Parkade.  Columbia Street, two heritage buildings, and the underground tunnel of the SkyTrain stood between me and our apartment tower.  (There is another, slightly shorter tower in our complex beyond the right side of the image.)

I shot this on my way to Westminster Pier Park. 

I continued across the parkade towards stairs and a public elevator.  These photos were taken in Westminster Pier Park along the mighty Fraser River.  It seems that our preview of summer has lasted past the weekend.  

It was clear with a high temperature of 26C.  In order words, it felt like perfect conditions.  Yet, unfortunately because of a mild winter and miniscule snow pack, we are already under Level 2 drought conditions.  It will apparently be a dry summer.  I am hoping that the wildfire season somehow remains muted, or, at very least, the prevailing winds blow the smoke eastward rather than into the Lower Mainland.

Visiting Tim in Golden Ears Provincial Park

As planned, Jiwan came here by SkyTrain from downtown Vancouver after his doctor's appointment.  We all got in the car and headed to the Golden Ears Provincial Park.  Let me give you a few facts.  

Golden Ears Provincial Park is a sprawling natural playground that consistently ranks as one of British Columbia’s most heavily frequented outdoor sanctuaries, drawing well over 600,000 visitors annually. Encompassing a staggering 62,539 hectares of rugged coastal mountain terrain, it serves as a massive reserve of thick hemlock and cedar forests anchored by the vast waters of Alouette Lake. Its immense popularity is largely due to its brilliant accessibility; sitting roughly 50 to 60 kilometers northeast of New Westminster, it requires only about an hour of driving time to completely trade the urban sprawl of the Lower Mainland for pristine wilderness.

As planned it took just about an hour to get there.  For the first time, I crossed the new bridge and travelled east on Highway 17.  That took us to the Golden Ears Bridge and right into the huge park to the campground and recreational areas around Alouette Lake.

We found Tim in campsite A78. He went on Monday and will go back to the West End either tomorrow as originally planned, or perhaps take an extra night.  We'd brought along lunch but decided to walk a couple of kilometers down to the lake.  Most of this type of lake runs north-south and was created by retreating glaciers.  Things were pretty empty at the campground.  As it is close to urban areas, it gets a whole lot of campers and will be constantly packed come summer.

Jiwan brought along lunch for he and Tim.  Jay made bagel-omelet sandwiches for us.  We picked up a few things at the Walmart earlier today, just chips and strawberries really.  It was nice to tuck into the food because we didn't get back from the lake until 2:00 pm.

By 3:30 Jay, Jiwan, and I started back.  Rush hour had already begun but we were travelling in the direction against most of the flow.  We returned via Highway 17 and I'm sure it would've taken much longer either on Highway 7 or Highway 1.  By the way, Highway 1 is the BC name for the Trans-Canada Highway.  We arrived home at 4:40 and Jiwan immediately went back home by SkyTrain.

It was a nice outing.

Love in Tokyo and a Totem Pole

Jay and I just got back from a short stay in Tokyo. He was remembering a 1966 Indian film called, 'Love in Toyko'. As most Bollywood films, there are numerous musical numbers. He cast it from YouTube on the computer to our TV. Singing in a park was not usual for films of that era. However, one set in Japan was rare, of course. In it, I noticed a totem pole and it made me wonder where the segment was shot. 

I typed this question for my AI: I just noticed a totem pole in 1966 Bollywood movie filmed in Japan. Explain this.

 

That visual anomaly in the 1966 Hindi classic Love in Tokyo is actually a fascinating bit of "Hurd-spec" history connecting your current home in British Columbia to the "Land of the Rising Sun." 

The park you saw is Shiba Park (Shiba-Koen) in Minato, Tokyo. It is the iconic setting for many of the film's most famous sequences, including the title track and the song "Sayonara Sayonara," primarily because it sits in the direct shadow of the Tokyo Tower (completed just eight years prior in 1958). 

The totem pole in the background was a very real landmark with a direct link to your own backyard:

The Origin: It was a gift to the city of Tokyo from the Government of British Columbia. 

The Occasion: Presented in 1961 by the then-Premier of B.C., W.A.C. Bennett, during a major trade mission to Japan. It was intended as a gesture of friendship and a symbolic "welcome" to the international community as Tokyo prepared for the 1964 Olympics. 

The Artist: The pole was carved by the renowned Doug Cranmer, a master Kwakwaka'wakw artist (and a frequent collaborator with Bill Reid). 

Seeing a piece of west coast First Nations art standing amidst the cherry blossoms and mid-century Tokyo architecture is a jarring, high-fidelity collision of cultures. For a resident of New Westminster like yourself, it’s a peculiar digital "easter egg"—a 1960s Bollywood lens capturing a 1961 B.C. artifact in a Japanese park. 

The pole stood in Shiba Park for several decades as a symbol of the Vancouver-Tokyo connection before it was eventually removed due to natural deterioration. In the 1960s, however, it was a "must-see" for any tourist—or any film crew looking for a unique, international vibe for their romantic musical. 

Sayonara Sayonara from Love in Tokyo 

This musical number features the vibrant atmosphere of mid-60s Tokyo, where the Shiba Park scenery—including the Tokyo Tower and the gift from B.C.—served as the backdrop for one of Bollywood's most enduring hits.

Embracing Change

 

I have found it interesting living in a place where things change.  I'm trying to say that the environment differs over time.  Our little city of New Westminster, especially downtown New West, looks vastly different than when we moved here in 1996.

The riverfront has developed, tall buildings now crowd streets which used to contain single-storey shops, and new infrastructure has been built.

The view is ever changing and I think witnessing that helps keep a person ready to continue growing and developing in tandem with the times.

This is the last full day in our apartment until next spring.  I stepped onto the balcony for two quick shots down and up along the mighty Fraser River.

First, the landscape picture was zoomed a bit to catch the land adjacent to the new Pier West development.  One can see the work on the Westminster Pier Park extension.  Artist renderings of the new space look lovely and I bet it will make a great addition to the city.

Second, the portrait orientation of the second shot is looking between buildings toward the Pattullo Bridge replacement.  All the the cables are now stretching down towards work crews completing the project.  There's still talk that it will open before Christmas, but I'm sure it'll take a while until the numerous exit and entrance ramps are complete.  

Nevertheless, I expect that when we return in mid-March both projects will be different than they are today.  It gives us more to look forward to when making our homecoming.  

The Same City Hall Since 1953

The weather seemed too good to waste. So, I took a tiny walk up to New Westminster City Hall.  Of course it sits right beside Tipperary Park, so I spent a few minutes walking to the uncovered stream.  

 

Warm Weather in New Westminster

We welcome the nice weather we're getting in the Lower Mainland of BC. Today, I did note a smidgeon of wildfire smoke in the air, but we've been blessed with a pretty small amount of that phenomena this season.  I walked out of the door with my Bluetooth headphones on.  My new phone played Spotify, kept track of my Fitbit walking route and stats, and still provided me with a chance to play with its camera.

 

I loved the feeling of sun on my face and old tunes in my ears.  The few people who were out appeared to be enjoying their chance to experience some nice weather too.