We got another late start today, starting with brunch at
Brioche in Gastown. By the time we got
on the hop on hop off bus for our second day of touring around Vancouver, it
was already midday. We do not recommend
the Vancouver Trolleys, although the actual tour is quite neat. The whole business is badly run and the staff
all register highly on the weirdness scale.
Never mind, we got safely and painlessly to Stanley Park which was our
intended destination.
Stanley Park is an enormous urban forest that takes up a
large part of the coastline by the Lions Gate Bridge. There is a beautiful stone sea wall that runs
for about 7.5km, and then the interior of the park has native forest, a small
lake, rose-gardens, rugby fields, two very small cricket pitches, a couple of
lawn bowling greens badly in need of a mow, an aquarium – not to mention the
usual kiddies playgrounds and picnic areas.
We started off near the beginning of the sea wall and walked around the
coast for a few kilometres before cutting inland to go through the forest to
Beaver Lake. This has a very impressive
beaver lodge but we did not see any beaver.
We did see Canada geese, ducks aplenty and an eagle soaring high above
us.
We followed Lovers Trail back to the coast, where the map
told us the Teahouse was. We were quite
keen for a cup of tea after all our walking, so were quite disappointed to find
it was a fancy restaurant and there would be an hour’s wait for a table (at
2.30pm!). So much for a teahouse. Luckily the Teahouse was a trolley bus stop
so we just hopped back on the next bus and headed back to Granville Island.
We had decided earlier in the day that we couldn’t leave
Vancouver without going out on the water.
The water taxis had been fun, but we wanted to go a bit further afield
than that. So we booked an overpriced
dinner cruise for the evening. It left
from Granville Island and so the first thing that we did when we got there was
to go and pick up our tickets. Wandering
around the shops was more fun on a Saturday too, as a lot more of them were
open – particularly the galleries. We
window shopped around for a while before stumbling on the Granville Island
Brewing Company again (I can’t imagine how that happened). A couple of winter ales later, and it was
time for the dinner cruise.
Overall, the dinner cruise wasn’t too bad. The cruise around the harbour at Vancouver
was very nice. We got to see the
downtown city skyline from a different perspective, the Lions Gate Bridge all
lit up at night, and the really flash houses in West Vancouver. The guide on the cruise pointed out a range
of houses of famous people. The ones we
can remember include Wayne Gretsky, Bryan Adams, Oprah, Englebert Humperdinck,
Cheech Moran and Shaquille O’Neill.
There was also a house on one of the points owned by someone Hussein
that would have been large enough to house five families – with everyone having
their own room. It was massive, but
surprisingly tasteful. The sunset as we
came back to the wharf was also spectacular.
Despite the feeling of having been ripped off (for what it was), it was
a very romantic evening out on the water with my darling.
The excitement wasn’t over though. After getting back to the wharf, we then had
the challenge of getting back to our accommodation. Granville Island is towards the south of
Vancouver and we needed to get back to the north. The water taxi took us across False Creek,
although in the dark it seemed to take longer than it had during the day. We then walked up to the skytrain, and caught
that back to the seabus. We had a bit of
a wait for the seabus, and then a nervous ride across wondering if we were
going to make the supposed connecting bus.
Luckily the bus waited and whisked us back to our door. For all that though, we got off the cruise at
8.30 and didn’t make it back to our accommodation until after 10.30.
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