…so I decided to travel outside Vancouver to the dairy farm that I had looked up a month prior.

I looked at my time. It was 2 pm and I was standing in downtown near the Waterfront. My train was scheduled to depart from Vancouver at 5:45 pm and the ticket indicated that I must arrive at least 30 minutes before departure. Additionally, I needed to pick up my things from Vivian’s house.

Quickly, I walked around the glass towers to find the common chains: Starbucks, Tim Hortons. Once located, I leaned against the wall, hiding, stealing the wifi. Throngs of people dressed in business attire swarmed around me—I looked like a student with my running shoes and casual backpacks. I connected with my iPod touch and looked up the dairy farm address. Google maps indicated that by public transit, it would take 90 minutes.

Within seconds, I was walking to the Skytrain station. By that time, I already lost a wifi connection. It crossed my mind that I only knew how to get to the destination, but no idea how I would return to Vivian’s house.

As I sat on the Millennium line out toward Burnaby, it dawned on me the level of stupidity. This was certainly like the time that I missed my flight to London from Berlin because I dawdled at the cafe slowly sipping ginger tea, because I went shopping for clothes in Mitte, because I really didn’t know how long it would take to get to the airport via public transit.

But the desire…the reason why I came this far…I could not let it go. I had to go to the dairy farm—this was the famed dairy farm akin to Straus Dairy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Surrounded by school children and Chinese grandparents, I rationalized my fears of missing the train. After all, Amtrak isn’t as vicious as airlines and wouldn’t charge me a hefty fee. And Vivian wouldn’t mind an extra night and Joe wouldn’t mind that I came a day later. It would be all ok.

So I was on the Skytrain for over 10 stops passing through numerous neighborhoods—I stared out the window as the buildings changed from large glass condos to smaller residences to trees…to strip malls…and areas that seemed only accessible by car. In a nervous moment, I tapped on something in the maps app and instantaneously lost the transit directions due to a lack of data connection. Even with my real phone, I could not look up directions on the Lumia so there was nothing that I could do.

Fortunately, my memory was annoyingly remarkable. I recalled the 116 bus and spotted the stop around the turnabout…