The City of Glass
Post title shamelessly stolen from one of Kelly’s favourite authors, Vancouver native Douglas Coupland. 😉
Our time in Seattle came to an end with our coach trip across the US-Canada border. We did manage to get one more morning coffee in at the incredible Anchorhead Coffee, which has pretty much ruined all other coffee shops for us.
The Cantrail/Amtrak Thruway bus was a bargain at $90 for the two of us, and the border crossing was very uneventful. Having pre-uploaded proof of vaccination into ArriveCan, the border agents just looked at our passports, checked our digital entry cards, and pretty much waved us through. We particularly enjoyed our Canadian bus driver apologising to us for the bus being 15 minutes later than scheduled – but it was rush hour in a major city so we think he did really well!
Chris booked us a very nice hotel for our first two nights in Vancouver. It was close to 6pm when we arrived, so we scoped out somewhere for dinner and had excellent tacos and cocktails at a Mexican restaurant downtown.
The next day, we had a nice breakfast nearby, and then decided to head for Granville Island via the little ferries that run in Vancouver’s harbour. It was already becoming a hot day, so it was great to be so close to the water!
Granville Island is famous for its public market, which has a massive variety of small businesses inside it – mostly food, which is where our cheeky lunchtime cheesecakes came from.
After returning to the city, we had to go and check out every Roots store in Vancouver, of course.
We relaxed for a little while after our shopping trip and met up with our local friend J for dinner at Haraheri, a lovely Japanese restaurant with an outdoor rooftop patio. J then took us to an event we’d never have heard of if we hadn’t been out with a local! We went to the beautiful venue Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden for the Mid-Autumn Moon Viewing.
We were starting to notice the sky was turning a strange colour at sunset while we were having dinner – unfortunately the wildfires in neighbouring areas were starting to pollute the air in metropolitan Vancouver, so I’m not sure any moon-viewing was had at the gardens, even with a telescope.
The next day was pretty smoky again, but J came downtown to meet us early (to beat the queue) for breakfast at a very popular waffle restaurant, before accompanying us across town to check into the first of our Rocky Mountaineer package hotels. This took us to the cruise terminal, where we took a walk around and saw the most immense cruise ships we’d ever seen (and you know we’ve seen quite a few sat in the harbour at home over the pandemic!)
After a short walk to find the Digital Orca – which we unfortunately couldn’t get closer to because of a private event that never materialised – we stopped at a nearby bar for some well-earned drinks and snacks to keep us going. We got to watch the floatplanes taking off and landing in the harbour, too. J took us to a lovely coffee shop later, and showed us around some other interesting parts of the city, before she left to catch up on some work. It was so good to see her!
We’d done rather a lot of walking over the past two days in Vancouver, so we chilled in our new hotel for a while before walking down to Steamworks in Gastown, a brewery pub/restaurant that Kelly had visited with her parents back in 2010. The beer was exceptionally good and the food was great too!
The next day, we technically started the Rocky Mountaineer tour, with a coach tour to Grouse Mountain, Capilano Suspension Bridge, and Capilano river hatchery. I’ll just drop a couple of albums here to illustrate!
Grouse Mountain
You can find out more about Grinder and Coola, the bears we photographed at Grouse Mountain wildlife refuge, here.
Capilano Suspension Bridge
(It’s just as high up and wobbly as you’d expect, but it’s very strongly constructed!)
Once we got back to the hotel, we got our tickets and luggage tags for the Rocky Mountaineer, had a nice dinner in Gastown, and then got a good night’s sleep before the actual train journey began!
