Vancouver is amazing. Truly amazing. I want to return there now.
We hit the road early in the morning and made the early ferry ride back over to Vancouver. We found our hotel in Richmond which is close to the Vancouver airport and decided to head into downtown. Mom and Dad had a bad outlook on Vancouver after spending a night there the week before after the cruise returned. Turns out that they ended up staying in the worst spot of town and there were a bunch of haggling homeless people (one person asked Dad for $2 instead of the $1 Dad gave him!) and vomit lined the streets. Needless to say, not a good experience!
I am glad they got the opportunity to see what Vancouver has to offer in the daylight. It was beautiful. Downtown is situated around the water, near the forest and next to the mountains. The architecture there was quite different than anything I’ve seen before. I’m assuming it was Asian-inspired from any films I’ve seen in Asia. Very modern looking.
Downtown was beautiful and the sun was shining and all was well in the world. We headed to GasTown which is a strip of downtown where there are nice restaurants and shops. We headed to the Old Spaghetti Factory for lunch. We then picked up some good souvenirs. You can’t go wrong with a $10 sweatshirt! In hindsight, I don’t even think I bought myself anything while I was out there, but at least I got a couple of t-shirts from my parents from their Alaskan trip.
I wanted to check out the Art Gallery as I read about an exhibition on comic books, video games and other multimedia. I was excited to see what it was all about but when we got there, it would have cost $20 each to get in and I knew very well that I would have wanted to stay there for a few hours at least and the others wouldn’t have been too interested. In the end, I realized that I would rather go with them to the Capilano Suspension Bridge so I decided that the exhibit would have to wait another day!
We took a quick drive out of downtown to the Capilano Suspension Bridge. I am scared of heights so I did not know what to expect. In the end, I wasn’t freaked out too much by the bridge. I had envisioned a bridge out of an Indiana Jones movie where it was rickety. This bridge had 75 people on it and was in no fear of breaking. In fact, at one point, I read how a tree had fallen onto the bridge during a giant windstorm a few years ago and they said the root ball was 60,000 pounds and it still didn’t break!
I really enjoyed the Capilano park as you go through this wooded area and you can walk from tree top to tree top along these bridges. We spent a few hours there and I would have to say that it was the highlight of the trip as we got to see how big the trees where (as legend holds it) and got to find out things about the forests around BC. We even got a certificate indicating we made it through all the checkpoints!
After heading back to the hotel, we went to a restaurant called White Spot which seemed very popular around Vancouver. It was good food and reminded me of Moxie’s. In the end, we retired for the night after a night cap and unfortunately, I don’t think Troy and I got much sleep that night before the flight. Maybe my mind was racing with the fact that we had to get up at 3:30AM to catch our flight the next morning.
Let me tell you, there’s no sense in rushing to an early flight. We got there and the ticket counters weren’t even open! Once they were, we went to security and they weren’t even open! I was dozing off fast. I slept most of the way on the way back and watched Jumper (which is a decent flick if you enjoy the sci-fi.) We got back into Toronto where Uncle Richard and Aunt Dinah graciously dropped off my car and then we headed out to London ON for the rest of our vacation.