Good morning, friends, and happy Tuesday! I hope everyone managed to successfully power through their Monday with a positive attitude – it’s the key to a successful week! Seriously, Monday is the breakfast of the week. If you don’t get that energy and get it early, you’re going to be dragging by the end of the week!
Since today is not only Tuesday, but it’s Travel Tuesday in these parts, I want to take you briefly back to one wonderful city I only managed to catch a glimpse of on my latest travels and would dearly love to see again:
Vancouver
We flew into Vancouver on our way to board our Alaska cruise, and were treated to a bit of a tour by the bus driver thanks to some closed roads. We seriously lucked out. The city is beautiful. They understand how to integrate greenspace better than any city I’ve ever seen. Just check out this rooftop at Canada Place!
Literally everything we came across was done in a way to be environmentally sustainable. How lovely is that?
Speaking of greenspace, Vancouver has a wonderful place to go and get away from the city called Stanley Park. We saw it from the water and didn’t know it was a park – it looked like a forested island in the middle of the sound, but then we realized that there were people hiking all over it, and even running and riding their bikes on a jogging path that encircles the entire perimeter of the island down by the water.
We decided to check it out. It looked like a great place to explore for our relatively short time in Vancouver, and we thought it would be fun not only to hike out to Stanley Park from our hotel, but to hike down to the waterfront and watch our cruise ship sail out on its next voyage with its new passengers.
So we set out walking – and, me being me, taking photographs.
We were amazed at all the enormous redwoods! For some reason, I never thought we’d find them this far north, that it would be too cold, but Vancouver has a surprisingly mild climate. The locals said it hasn’t snowed there for the last three years! So it doesn’t surprise me that we should find so much flora that I associate with California climates.
We were also amazed that…well…the distances that didn’t look that far on the map, even when we looked at the map scale, felt a lot farther when we walked them. It might have really been a far hike, or it might just have been that we were really tired from a week of hiking all over glaciers and so on, but we really started getting tired and hungry when we were about halfway through the park to our destination.
Luckily for us, we came to the Stanley’s Park Bar and Grill. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s only been open for a few months and it’s definitely a treat! Along with delicious food, they carry both their own line of brews and a number of Whistler brews, along with plenty of offerings for those who aren’t looking for a brew variety {we were tired and hot from walking a looooong distance, so we went with the brew option}.
Isn’t that a charming sight?
After fortifying ourselves with food and good spirits, we headed out to check out the nearby Stanley Park Rose Garden. As a Disney addict, I had “painting the roses red” running through my head in the process, but it was fun to walk through the gardens and check out the displays of both local and imported flora.
We managed to tear ourselves away from that and keep walking toward the Lion’s Gate bridge, which was where we wanted to watch the ship pass. During this whole walk, we enjoyed seeing the ships at dock, looking out over Vancouver, and, finally, the bridge itself.
If the Lion’s Gate Bridge looks at all like the Golden Gate, there’s a good reason for that: they were designed by the same people. This one was actually commissioned by the Guinness brothers, they of the amazing Irish stout. They had a factory on one side of the channel and their workers kept missing the ferry, so they took measures to ensure that no one would be late to the important business of beer brewing.
From there, we were able to watch the Disney Wonder set sail on her next adventure.
And once she sailed past us…we realized that we had to walk all the way back to the hotel.
Once we got going, the walk wasn’t bad. The weather had cooled off, we were happy and full, and as the sun set on us, we had another nice adventure to reflect on.
I wish we had had more time to spend exploring Vancouver, from the botanical gardens to the architecture and all the wonderful sustainability initiatives, not to mention the delicious cuisine, but we had to save all of that for another time. This was just a quick stop-over on our way from the mainland to our new home in Hawaii, but Vancouver is definitely one place we would love to pay another visit.
Where have your travels taken you lately? Link up with Travel Tuesday, hosted by the lovely Belinda of Found Love, Now What, and Bonnie of A Compass Rose, and share your adventures!