Stanley Park and Gastown

It is just too late to come up with a better blog title; the straight old facts will have to do.

We woke to a light drizzle in the air, after one of the best night’s sleep we have had for a couple of weeks now.  Maybe we are more accustomed to the cold then we care to admit.  Grant finally had success purchasing our Vancouver Trolley Bus Hop On, Hop Off tour tickets on-line.  We have tried several times, as they were offering a special where if you bought a one day ticket on-line, you got the second day free.  Of course, once the transaction was complete we were asked to print our tickets.  Not such an easy request.  Still we weren’t too worried – on every other tour where this has been requested, we have simply shown the confirmation email on our phones.

Getting across to Vancouver was easy once more; a bus stopped just outside our motel and took us to the Seabus terminal.  A Seabus was ready to take us on board, and we arrived in the city ready for our tour.  Problem number one – the woman exchanging vouchers for tickets said no, we had to print the voucher.  When we explained we had not had to do this for any other tour company, she said she would ring her main office (she must have had a different number to the one on the website, as we had tried this before leaving out room and found it impossible to talk to an actual person).  A few false starts later, she spoke to the office, they asked for our confirmation number and all was well.  Well, sort of.  The bus started off and the driver (in his late fifties, early sixties maybe) announced, very nervously, that this was his first day “back on the job” and while he had made mistakes he had learned from them, and had thrown all nervousness out the window.  Right.  Our nervousness levels were rising fast.  As he drove, he had a bit of a spiel about the city generally and a couple of the sights.  He then stopped for some more passengers – and when we started up again, he began at the beginning!  With the first day nervousness and all!  We started to wonder why he had been off the job.  Had he crashed the trolley?  Hit a pedestrian?  Driven the trolley drunk?  We couldn’t put up with much more, and since the trolleys came by (with different drivers) every 45 minutes, we decided to get off and find somewhere for brunch.

While walking to find a café recommended by Trip Advisor, we stumbled across the Bellaggio Café.  This place did a lovely brunch, along with coffee so nice I had to have two.  I only hope we can remember where it is next time we are in the city.  After brunch we did a little window shopping before hopping back on another trolley, this time with a driver that was both sane and informative.  The weather had cleared by now, so we enjoyed the trip through Stanley Park, Vanier Park and over the Burrard Bridge, where the driver pointed out an eagle’s nest with the female eagle sitting in it.  Sadly it was too far to take a photo but we enjoyed the sight.   Our trolley tour tickets are valid for another day (which doesn’t have to be tomorrow) so we now have a better idea of which parts of town we want to explore further.

For today, we got off near the Library and wandered down to Gastown, one of the oldest parts of the city.  It is very pretty, lots of brick and cobblestones and quaint shops.  Well, they look quaint from the outside, but I am sure all the merchandise is seriously over-priced by virtue of this area being a Tourist Destination.  Grant found a lovely detour (using Google maps) back to the Seabus terminal via a waterfront park, which was lovely.  We dawdled a little watching an enormous container ship belonging to Hyundai docking at the wharf.  The sheer size of these ships is incredible, and we have enjoyed watching the working ports that deal with them.

Sadly, getting back to the terminal was not as easy as it looked on the map.  We kept walking towards the terminal, only to find we were on the wrong side of the railway tracks.  We were right underneath the terminal and light rail stations but there were no public stairs or lifts.  We ended up walking further, into the lower levels of the Vancouver Conference Centre where an American Education Research conference was going on.  This might have been quite interesting but we thought they wouldn’t welcome gate-crashers.  We tried to blend in and escaped via the escalator.  Phew!

As this had been very stressful, we decided to stop at the Steamworks Brew Bar beside the train station before boarding our Seabus.  We got into a very interesting conversation with a builder visiting from England, starting with the NHL play-offs, moving on to football and finally getting to the state of the UK job market.  He was lovely and I know Grant really enjoyed having someone knowledgeable about sport to talk with.  Our bartender was great too; he was Australian but occasionally sounded as though he had come to Canada via Ireland – what an accent!

Our trip home was as good as the trip over – the Seabus was right there ready for us to board, and then our bus came pretty much as soon as we disembarked.  We are not sure if we are just very lucky, or if the public transport here really does run that frequently.

There is a little Vietnamese restaurant just beside our motel, so we thought we would go there for dinner.  It was a delicious meal; the manager/waitress essentially told us what to have (which was very helpful as choosing was proving difficult).  We no doubt ended up eating far more than we meant to, but the whole meal came to only CAN$25.  We think we were undercharged, but as we were no longer sure exactly what we had ordered it was hard to tell.  An interesting end to an interesting day.