Today is 30/9 and it is currently 4:00pm. We fly home to Australia tomorrow so I thought I would do yesterday and today’s post now as we have finished our final scheduled activity.
Day 25
We finally had bad luck with the weather in Canada, we have woken up to a very wet day today. We started our morning with a coffee and breakfast wrap at Delaney’s Coffee just behind our motel. The coffee was amazing (speaking as a coffee snob) and is only one of two good coffees we’ve had since arriving in Canada.
Today we are hiking through Lynn Canyon Park which is just north of Vancouver. We were picked up by Adrian from Breakaway Adventures at 8:20 on the dot and were soon off to the Canyon to start our hike.
Adrian had advised that the hike was of a moderate to intermediate level of difficulty and it certainly lived up to that. There are a number of climbs out of the Canyon as you leave the river behind and follow the Baden Powell trail. There is a suspension bridge about 1.1km into the hike, which Stu went onto and it is over a pool that is normally lovely and emerald. However they have had so much rain recently that the river was running very quickly and was very high. It also meant that the waterfalls that had stopped running were all running as we followed the river.
The park is a protected piece of old growth forest, although you can see plenty of evidence of where logging for some of the big cedar trees occurred in the early 1900s. As with every other park we’ve been to – National or municipal, dogs are allowed in the parks which is really beautiful to see. There were lots of dogs in the park when we were there walking both on an off the leash.
There are resident black bears in the park, but unfortunately (or fortunately), we didn’t spot any of them while we were doing our hike. Adrian had last seen a bear on the trail about 3 weeks earlier.
After the hike we were dropped off our motel, showered and then hit the pavement to go do some last minute shopping at the other end of downtown. By the time we got to bed last night we had walked more than 27,000 steps – it was a big day and my feet and calves were very sore lol and we were both pretty wet as it rained almost all day. We had amazing Mexican for dinner (again a decent walk from the motel) before hitting the hay.
Day 26
Today is the National Day of Reconciliation and Truth Telling and seems to be a public holiday. All Government agencies and government funded agencies are on holidays today and some shops and restaurants are not open. Our guide in our tour today said that businesses that operate today pay their staff time and a half, so I’m assuming it is an official public holiday.
The weather today is totally different to yesterday, the sun is out and it is actually warm. I wore jeans this morning thinking it would be cold and I was totally wrong.
We had breakfast at a diner up the road from the hotel. I decided to try a Canadian breakfast of pancakes, bacon and sausage. The serve was massive with three very thick pancakes on my plate. I managed to get through two but the third defeated me.
We walked down Davie Street to Granville and then up to where we were meeting our tour guide. We were a little early so we wandered around a bit before meeting up with the tour.
We did the sinners and sweets tour which took us to a number of places for pastries but also gave us a good run down of the history of Vancouver. The Gallery, which used to be the courthouse, was designed by Francis Mawson Rattenbury who designed the Parliament building on Vancouver Island. Our guide gave us a dramatised version of his history in the Art Gallery foyer.
From here we walked though downtown Vancouver stopping at several buildings learning the sinful history of Vancouver and ended up at the Marine Building which has its own sordid history – noting the Guiness family (yes the family from Ireland) now own the building, buying it at a discount price during the depression because the owner had a number of debts to some very shady individuals. Apparently the Guiness family have done very well out of Vancouver including having large tracts of land with some relatively racist clauses written into the land titles.
We are now back at the hotel after walking back along the waterfront and by Stanley Park.
We will head out shortly and look for something for Eric (there is a cute pet store around the corner) and maybe a cocktail before we think about somewhere to have dinner tonight.
We have had an amazing time in Canada and Alaska and as usual even 27 days is not enough – we only really scratched the surface there is so much more to see on the west coast, let alone the east coast as well.
davstuholidays 