Central City, National City, Salt Lake City, and Vancouver

This past week I have been on vacation; yes, priests take vacations too! My vacations tend to take on quite the unique flavor though (as anyone who follows my various social media accounts can attest to). I enjoy traveling and as my vacations don’t often match up well with anyone to go with me, I often travel solo, and being a solo traveler, it has it’s perks (and it’s disadvantages too). Most often being a solo traveler means quite a bit of freedom in where I want to go or what I want to do since I’m the only one whom I have to consult with to make those decisions. Being the geek that I am, vacations usually are targeted around a comic con somewhere or are linked to some site I want to visit because of a geeky reason. This particular trip included a visit to Salt Lake City for FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention. I drove out to Salt Lake City and attended the Con all three days, meeting the various celebrities whom I had wanted to meet, getting awesome photo ops with them, finding amazing artists and buying some great geeky art, and perusing the various vendors finding geeky things to buy. Among those whom I was privileged to meet were: Katee Sackhoff (The Flash, Battlestar Galactica), Tom Holland (Spider-man), Hayden Christensen (Star Wars), Ian McDiarmid (Star Wars), Rebecca Mader (Once Upon a Time, LOST), Lana Parilla (Once Upon a Time), Carlos Valdez (The Flash), Kiefer Sutherland (24), Benedict Wong (Dr. Strange), and Pearl Mackie (Doctor Who), among many others!

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The majority of the next week I spent up Vancouver, BC, Canada, a place I’ve visited a couple times and has always been a favorite vacation spot for me, but this particular trip had more happening than I could have ever predicted (in a geeky awesome way!). I stayed in a hotel downtown (as I have done previously) and enjoy exploring the city and the area around Vancouver (in particular I love visiting the village of Steveston, where “Once Upon a Time” was filmed).

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I wandered around the city and thanks to twitter, realized that on the first day I was there I happened to be within a block of the actual film crew and shoot for The Flash and was completely oblivious to it all. I saw some people had the fortune to meet Grant Gustin (Barry Allen/The Flash), Danielle Panabaker (Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost), and Hartley Sawyer (Ralph Dibney/Elongated Man). I was so bummed that I missed that entirely, as The Flash is one of my favorite superhero shows on TV.

So, I swallowed my disappointment and kept going on vacation mode. Met up with a buddy who lives up there and had a great time. He introduced me to some of the great craft breweries up there in Vancouver and we had supper at Storm Crow Alehouse, a geeky sports bar with board games and geeky paraphernalia.

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The last day I was in Vancouver I did some scouting. Once again Twitter had informed me that Supergirl was planning on filming near downtown so I decided to wander over to where the shot was to see what I could see. As I approached the house I could see all the film crew and security around and continued walking on the sidewalk. Low and behold, Chyler Leigh (Alex Danvers) and Jesse Rath (Brainy) were walking around very near to where I was! I was able to stay and watch some of the shoot for a bit, but did not get the chance to actually meet any of the actors/actresses. I did chat with security and the production crew just a little bit, which was still way more than I expected. Watching them shoot was also exciting (for a geek like myself), even though really what I saw was them do was shoot the same 15 second scene about 3 different times. Still cool! I walked back to the hotel and was going to chill for a bit, when Twitter once again revealed to me that The Flash crew was spotted downtown at a parking lot. I decided to head down there immediately to see, once again, if I could see anything. After getting there, I was treated to seeing Grant Gustin in full Flash suit filming a scene at the parking lot. I watched for a bit and realized they were finished with that particular shoot and were starting to pack up. That’s when Grant Gustin came over to say hi to the group of fans that were there watching, myself included! With that, he graciously offered a selfie and I walked away from that lot quite overwhelmed by the experience of it all! I hadn’t expected to meet anyone from The Flash that day, especially since I had missed it earlier that week, and then to meet the star himself, Grant, was unbelievable. He is such a cool, down-to-earth guy. In fact, I’m still geeking out that I met him. Totally, unexpectedly awesome!