Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

The Howard Johnson's on Granville in Vancouver is really quite a nice hotel in a very sketchy neighborhood. The neighborhood really isn't that bad, if you don't mind the concentration of adult bookstores, peep show parlours, headshops and vagrants.

We arrived Monday night with just enough time to watch the 'Canes defeat the Oilers in the final game of the Stanley Cup (bummer if you're Canadian). After carting a TON of stuff up to our rooms, it was off to a nice dinner on Robson Street, the shopping capitol of Western Canada. We ate seafood and and toasted to our future success with a nice BC Chardonnay (Burrowing Owl, hoo knew?) at Joe Forte's. I'm not putting the picture of that toast up... but I'm sure John G or Melissa will.

The next day and night it was all prepping for Thursday's prospect pitch meeting in Seattle. Spending hours together in the "Home Office Suite" at Hojos was awesome. I could tell that as a team we were really clicking. It also confirmed what I already knew, that this venture of ours is going to be wildly successful because the three of us are REALLY good at what we do. We make an awesome team.

We took a break from planning to go to the WINBC barbeque at the really cool campus of Nokia in Burnaby (more on that later, I'm sure from John G or Melissa, or both), then it was back to it in the Home Office Suite, now littered with empty Starbucks cups, food wrappers and random notes. We worked until our brains couldn't work any further, but were back at it bright and early the next morning.