Living on the west side

Like most cool people, I've always lived on the east coast. Now for the last 3 months I've been struggling to adapt to west side living. And it's surprisingly hard!

In my brain, east is towards the sea and west is inland. Now poor O'Hara is dealing with the fact that my navigation skills are basically zero.

A common situation is us driving towards a highway and O'Hara asking which way we need to go. I look at the signs for a while before deciding that we want to take the turnoff and go east... only to work out once we're on the highway that east is heading to the wrong side of the country (French Canada scares me) and having to do illegal u-turns. So many road signs here only seem to say "H(something) West" or "H(something) East". These little green signs are my enemy.

This is of course not helped by the fact that Google Maps doesn't work in Canada. Yep that's right. No probs in tiny little Cobar, or Hobart. Neither of which are thriving technological hot spots.

Example: We want to go to New Afton. That red arrow is where we get sent. The green arrow is where we want to go. On our first day of work we stayed on the highway, and had to do the old drive through the emergency only u-turn spot. I think this is a common occurrence for people coming to site. Note: I think now if you search "New Afton" rather than "New Gold" it works... but when we first arrived and didn't know where to go, no such luck!

Example 2: We want to get O'Hara to a rugby game. There is bad traffic so we're already late.  The red arrow is where it took us, again the green is where we wanted to go.

On a phone it wasn't that easy to see that where it was sending us was actually the highway back to downtown Vancouver. A 20min round trip. Fabulous!


But then Canada makes it all worth it when you get to drive with views like this: