Ordinarily we leave home at some ridiculous hour, 4am, 3am, for an early flight to Sydney to connect onto our international leg. Not this time. We don’t leave Canberra until 3.30pm on Monday afternoon, or we’re supposed to. A mix-up with the taxi driver means we end up calling an Uber instead, and we’re out the door at 3.50. Not a problem. Anyone who knows me knows I always build in extra time.
We’re at the airport in plenty of time, bags checked by 4.15, and head straight for the lounge. At the gate for 4.50 boarding, we then sit for an hour. It seems a simple thing, running a Canberra to Sydney service on time. Whether it’s aviation being aviation, cost-cutting, or something technical, who knows, but it’s invariably late. Sitting at the gate eats into our Sydney connection time and starts to needle at us. We eventually take off around 6, an hour late, and through some miracle land in Sydney at 6.30. A very fast flight, tailwinds helping, and the pilot mentions air traffic control gave us shortcuts in because a good number of us on board had international connections. Vancouver for us. Los Angeles for some. Southeast Asia for others.
We land at Gate 19 and move to Gate 15 for the international transfer, a bus ride across to the other terminal and through security. Sydney’s international security is a bit of a dog’s breakfast at the best of times. Add my bad sight and Mardi’s neurodiversity, and a crowd of pushy passengers all trying to make their flights, and everyone ends up a little stressed. We get through eventually. It never ceases to amaze me, watching people argue with security over the litre of shampoo or the bottle of water they’re desperate to take with them. The staff just say no. We leave them to it, grab our bags, and head for the lounge.
Ten minutes to spare before boarding for Vancouver, enough for a quick snack, then we’re escorted onto the plane. The Qantas crew are excellent as always, looking after me well, and we settle in for the 13.5 hour haul across the Pacific. A couple of movies, a good meal, a whiskey, eight hours’ sleep somewhere in there, and suddenly it’s only two hours to landing. A bit more reading, some music, and we’re down.
I’d arranged a meet and assist at Vancouver Airport, so we wait to disembark and get guided to a waiting area, then guided again to a bank of golf carts for the passengers needing help. It should be straightforward. It isn’t. Ground crew are chasing a lost passenger, holding everyone up, one man who’s lost his wife somewhere between the secure and non-secure areas after she needed a bathroom. We’re getting frustrated by this point, and I ask one of the ground staff if we can just get moving. Eventually we do, the cart delivering us to the passport kiosks for entry into Canada. From there we tell the ground staff we’ll make our own way, and she points us toward baggage claim. Bags collected, we’re out the door and into a taxi.
Thirty minutes later we pull up at the Hotel Belmont in downtown Vancouver and head up to room 311. The Belmont has more history to it than its funky, retro-cool interiors let on. Built in 1912 on Granville Street by the Vancouver architectural firm Parr and Fee, who designed several of the city’s Edwardian-era landmarks including the Hotel Europe and the Vancouver Block, it opened as the Hotel Barron before being renamed in 1926. Prohibition closed the saloons that once kept it profitable, and the building drifted through decades and names, the Nelson Place Hotel, then simply the Dakota, before a 2017 restoration stripped back the intervening decades to reveal the original details. It reopened in 2021 as Hotel Belmont Vancouver MGallery, the brand’s first hotel in Canada, its flamingo pink and sea foam interiors now playing on the vibrancy of the Granville Street entertainment strip it’s always sat on.
Aside from the history, the rooms themselves are tiny. Two double beds, no sitting area, a bar fridge the size of a shoebox, one bedside table. In Europe last year, none of our hotel rooms had fridges at all, and we assumed North America would be different. The Belmont didn’t have one either, and we had to request one, which now sits right beside the bed where I climb out, which is annoying but livable. We use the second bed for luggage storage instead, four nights being short enough not to bother unpacking properly, and Mardi, in her usual simple but complex way, has the room organised and comfortable within minutes. A wander of ten or fifteen minutes turns up nothing better than a couple of slices of pizza, and we head back to the hotel and call it a day.
