The little detail...

And so we rolled into Seattle, in the summer twilight - on a collision course with our next travel adventure. :)

The moment we looked at the near empty baggage carousel we guessed something was wrong. The staff confirmed what our bag check-in slips had clearly stated for our whole train journey - our bags had gotten off the train at 'SLM' (Salem, Oregon) not 'SEA' (Seattle, Washington) with us. (We hadn't even thought to check the details on the slips, trusting that the staff in the Berkeley Amtrak station knew what they were doing - naive, I know.)

And so we entered the bag retrieval bureaucratic treadmill I'm sure most seasoned travellers are familiar with. Luckily the staff member we dealt with at Seattle was the most cluey and friendly cog we'd come across in the Amtrak mechanism - she promised to not only ensure personally that Salem would be contacted first thing in the morning, but that she'd start her next shift early to ensure she did it herself. With nothing more to we could do but wait for word via our next host's girlfriend's mobile (the only contact method we had available at the time) we boarded the bus that would take us north, to Vancouver.

The bus trip was uneventful (our lack of bags actually made our initial crossing into Canada easier, although there was some confusion at the border over which part of the building held the staff who would process non-US travellers, and then how to leave that part of the building...) but soon we were in another confusing city, in another confusing country, with the most problematic set of instructions yet.

Theoretically we would take the easily accessible (to locals) public buses to the University of British Columbia campus, and would then simply navigate to Green College. But we had seemed to have arrived after the buses stopped running. And the Amtrak station (bizarrely) has no public phone. And it was raining. In desperation we hunted for a cab - finally finding one, we attempting to overcome our lack of local knowledge and the driver's thick Jewish accent, to communicate our destination. After several false turns in the university campus, we managed to find navigate our driver to Green College, and our final surreal challenge.

Green College is an unexpectedly beautiful (for student accomodation) set of buildings, which in our exhaustion seemed majestic, ghostly, and completely empty. (Imagine something between a classic English university college and an Ewok village. I'm serious.) We staggered from door to door trying to find Matt's place (or rouse someone who could direct us) with a growing sense of unease. Finally, we found the correctly-numbered door - but pounding on it roused no-one. Another door was opened by a nervous student - in broken Canadian Mandy tried to communicate our plight. The poor girl had never heard of anyone called Matt living behind the door in question, but offered to call the occupants on the phone. This finally rouse the occupants - who turned out to be Matt and his housemate!

The confusion was soon explained. In Australia Mandy's friend had chosen to Anglicise his (originally Polish) name to Matt, but in Canada he was using the original. After a few brief introductions (to Matt's girlfriend, and to his housemate) we collapsed exhausted into our already prepared bed (thanks, Matt) and were soon fast asleep.

As an epilogue, I can tell you we did get our bags back - in less than two days, too. (And our travel insurance applies in this eventuality by covering $500 of new clothes - which goes some of the way to justifying that particular expense.) The final gauntlet involved retrieving our bags from the customs officials in the Vancouver Amtrak station, where they seemed to be taking special interest in one of mine. After asking me to unlock it (and taking special care to open it facing away from me) the staff member called over her cow-orker to point out something in the contents. She commented, "oh, they're only books." Alarmed, I asked, "Why, what do books look like on an x-ray?"

"Big bricks of drugs."

Travel is exciting, I'll be the first to say it. :)