Vancouver

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The Difference Between Full-Time RVing and Tourism

Today, I had the great joy of showing my friend some of my favourite sites in the Vancouver area. How lovely it is to stay long enough in one place to go back and re-explore sites you enjoyed!

We had a really, really full day. The weather cooperated beautifully, being just warm enough to be comfortable, with a mix of sun and clouds.

Late morning, we took off for Lynn Canyon. It was warmer today than the last time I went, but not by much; it gets cool up there in North Vancouver in the rain forest! It was wonderful hiking weather and we earned the picnic lunch I’d packed.

We then headed to Stanley Park via the Lions’ Gate Bridge. The park was very full this time around, so I felt very fortunate to find parking quickly. We were just heading up to the aquarium to see the killer whale statue when my friend noticed a horse drawn trolley that seemed just about ready to take off. We learned that it was a one hour tour that would take us to all the sites we wanted to see, so we decided to get on, figuring that it would easier than trying to find parking at each location.

I’ll pause here to address the issue of horse drawn tours being exploitative. I had a theory about this before I got on and it was confirmed by the driver who addressed the issue head on. The horses pulling these trolleys are big draft horses which have very little use in our day and age. A lot of these older animals get sent to the glue or jell-o factory. The company running the tours rescues these horses, gives them purpose and needed exercise, and allows them a dignified retirement.

The tour was fantastic and well worth the 28.50$ per person. Our guide was funny and an excellent storyteller. We learned that Stanley Park was originally called Duck Head Point (because it really does look like the head of a duck!) and was home to ‘squatters’ consisting of minorities–Chinese, Hawaiian, Métis, etc. The government used this point as a strategic military location for a long time and when that purpose was no longer required, they wanted to develop the land seeing as Vancouver (population 2,000 at the time!) was booming. Real estate speculators were worried that the introduction of so much new land would devalue other properties, so some backroom dealing was done to turn Duck Head Point into a park. Of course, all the ‘squatters’ were expropriated without compensation. It is a sad story with a happy ending. Also, as Stanley Park used to be a logging area, all of the forest there is second regeneration growth, not primeval forest as some romantics like to believe.

After Stanley Park, we drove to nearby Denholm Street. My friend wanted to try sushi and I was eager to go back to Tanpopo, so I decided that its proximity to Stanley Park meant that was where we were destined to end up for dinner. We walked up and down Denholm for  a bit, popping into a bookstore where I found a remaindered book about the Chilkoot Pass!

Dinner was just as good as it was the last time I ate at Tanpopo and I added spicy tuna rolls to my repertoire. They are soooo yummy. My friend liked everything but the teriyaki salmon because it was too dry for her taste. Otherwise, she bravely sampled everything.  I must say I didn’t get anything too ‘weird’ as I didn’t want to turn her off suishi from the get go, and  I’m proud of her for having several pieces of salmon sashimi and ordering the prawn tempura on her own.

We ended our night with a dip in the park’s hot tub.

I put up some new pictures, including lovely shots of Vancouver’s skyline that I missed because of fog the first time I went to Stanley Park.

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Geeky Tourism

It’s no secret that I am a complete geek, at least it shouldn’t be! So, the following should not come as a surprise. 🙂 I went on a field trip for work today, to Canada Place. The colleague who took me there picked a route that took us through historic, and very quaint!, Gastown. There, I saw a clock that anyone who watched tv in the late 80’s, early 90’s will recognize. I forgot my camera sort of on purpose since I didn’t think it would be appropriate to take pictures on work time. I wouldn’t have been able to post them anyway. So, check out this page about MacGyver shooting locations to see some of what I saw today (first six pairs of pics)!

(Just be grateful that you weren’t privy to the entry I posted on another blog after I spent a full day at Las Vegas’ Star Trek the experience. 😀 )

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Bravely Forth Into the Ghetto

Well…

I think I deserve a ‘I stopped at a red light at East Hastings and Main and lived to tell the tale’ bumper sticker. *sheepish grin*

After all the worry and planning I realised that I was better off just going through this intersection than trying to contour it. East Hastings is a busy thoroughfare and it was rush hour; I figured that I was safer there in my car than wandering around blindly in neighbouring streets. I was accosted by a very aggressive squeegee guy, but I managed to convey through the glass that he had better back off.

East Hastings at highway 1 (a non scary section of this ill-famed thoroughfare)

East Hastings at highway 1 (a non scary section of this ill-famed thoroughfare)

Driving west on East Hastings was everything I’d been told it would be, a subtle descent into hell. I have seen some very scummy American slums and this is the first place in Canada that even remotely compares to the bad neighbourhoods I’ve been in south of the 49th parallel. Nothing I read about East Hastings and Main was exaggerated and I was very grateful to be in my car (albeit a target of one with a bright colour and an out of province licence plate!) and not on foot!

My colleagues all advised me to take public transit, but I am glad that I decided to drive. Majel has a hard time in the GVR for some reason, so I missed a couple of turns, but if it hadn’t been for that, I would have made it to my friend’s hotel in 40 minutes flat. I still squeaked in in under an hour when I’d been told it would take at least an hour and fifteen minutes! I parked at the hotel, which had better rates than I would have expected. My friend and I were so glad to see each other and we marveled that we were walking in downtown Vancouver of all places together!

For dinner, we hiked to Tanpopo, a sushi restaurant, where we had a great meal! We went for the ‘all you can eat’ option and let’s just say that we ate ALL we could eat. 😀 The food was awesome! There is a large selection of items on this menu and you pick the ones you want; they prepare enough portions for the number of diners. I’m more familiar with the ‘typical’ sushi restaurant menu, so I took the lead, but we did try a few items blindly. The real winners tonight were prawn gyoza (dumplings), salmon teriyaki (salmon baked with teriyaki sauce), and salmon sashimi (raw salmon, which I like with a bit of pickled ginger and soy sauce). Neither one of us liked the seafood fried rice and my friend wasn’t fond of the nori-wrapped scallop cones because she doesn’t like nori (a seaweed), while I loved them… because I love nori!

My friend’s hotel is on Robson Street, which I firmly intend to revisit as it is filled with quirky boutiques and restaurants! Getting there from home, or home from there, is a non-issue since it’s the same route I’d take to go to Stanley Park. In fact, I didn’t need Majel to get home tonight.

Driving home, I discovered soon as we passed the Massie tunnel in Richmond that I’d been afraid of the wrong thing.

We’ve been having gorgeous weather the last few days, but it hasn’t lasted. We got snow tonight and freezing temperatures and highway 99 became a sheet of ice. I took a full hour to drive the 20 kilometres I had left to go, passing at least a dozen cars in the ditch. People out here simply don’t know how to drive in these conditions. I geared down to second, slow enough for me to be able to stop on the snowy shoulder if I started to glide, glued my eyes to the road ahead, and just crawled all the way home.

So, I’m here safe and sound where it is freezing because I ran out of propane about five minutes after I turned on the furnace. :headdesk: There is of course no way I’m going back out there, so I’m hoping that the electric heater will be enough to keep us cozy tonight.

What a week I’ve had: crossing a suspension bridge (THREE times), experiencing East Hastings and Main, and successfully navigating my car down a 20km sheet of black ice. Can anyone recommend a good place in Vancouver to learn skydiving because I think that’s where I’m at now. 😀

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Circumventing the Ghetto

I forget where I was in September, but there was one city where I asked my GPS to take me to a grocery store and when I got there, I discovered that it was in a rather unsavoury part of town. I was very nervous and realised that software can’t protect you from taking a bad off ramp.

This was further evidenced tonight when I asked Google Maps to plot my drive from work to a downtown hotel where I will be meeting my friend tomorrow. It gladly obliged, helpfully telling me to follow Main and turn left at East Hastings. *cue in the horror movie music*

Yes, I am finally going to see downtown Vancouver tomorrow. And I’m driving there. At rush hour. My options were a forty-five minute transit ride from work to the hotel and a two hour bus ride home, or a potentially two hour rush hour drive and forty-five minute drive home. I decided that with what’s been going on in broad daylight lately, taking an unfamiliar transit route in the dark wasn’t something I wanted to do. Nor is going through the ghetto, even if it’ll supposedly shave ten minutes off my drive.

Wish me luck finding parking!

(All this intrepidness will be worth it for a sushi dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in six months!)

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Granville Island Disappointment

I thought I’d done my homework on Granville Island or, rather, how to get to it, and that driving was a sensible choice. It would take me nearly three hours to get there on public transit and there is ‘ample’ parking.

Well, I knew I was in trouble when I saw the line up to get onto the island. There was lots of parking, but I wouldn’t have called it ‘ample.’ ‘Ample’ in my book means enough parking in relation to the number of spots needed. Moreover, no one thought to warn me that there is almost no signage on the island, that one ways are poorly marked, and that everyone drives and walks around like there is absolutely no congestion. By the time the exit was in sight, I knew that even if by some twist of fate I managed to find a parking spot on a second or third circle around (after waiting in line to get back in, of course), getting out of said spot would require way more effort than the island seemed to be worth. I didn’t want to give up, not when I was doing almost 90km round trip, so I poked around the side streets adjacent to the island looking for a place to leave the car, but, of course, there was no parking permitted. So, I just went home. 🙁

Granville Island seemed like a lot of fun, with small artisan shops, quirky-looking restaurants, and buskers aplenty. But I doubt it’s worth the six hours round trip it would take to get there and back via public transit, so it’s unlikely I’ll get to experience it.