Vancouver

Before we went to Eugene to celebrate the wedding, we started out our vacation by going to Vancouver. We'd heard that it is a great place to visit, and I wanted to add another Canadian Province to my list (which includes Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia). We spent 4 days in the city. Here are some pics of the highlights.

Downtown Vancouver does not have a highway (they took it out about a decade ago), and it is extremely walkable. We were carless, so we enjoyed walking, biking, bussing, and even the cute little water taxi. 

We rented bikes and rode through Stanley Park, going around the perimeter seawall, but also cutting inland to see Beaver Lake. These totem poles are a popular destination in Stanley Park.

We also rode our bikes to the little aqua bus to cross over to Granville Island to have lunch. There is a huge market there with lots of fresh produce as well as other food items.

The Vancouver Art Museum is nearly free on Tuesday evenings (donation), and the big exhibit right now is part of the Cone Sisters collection. I had briefly heard about these two sisters from Baltimore who were friends with Matisse and Picasso and others, and who collected their works. This exhibit was excellent.

This colosseum is actually the public library in downtown Vancouver, just blocks from our guesthouse. It's open often and is lovely inside. Apparently, this is just a branch. 

We stayed at the Urban Hideaway Guesthouse which I found on the Lonely Planet website. It is the 4th oldest building in downtown, and the only house. It really IS hidden away behind that Stamp Works store. Our room was the little window to the right of that bay window.

We took the bus out to UBC (University of British Columbia) and toured the Museum of Anthropology, the Nitobe Memorial Garden (Japanese), and the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research.

Another bus adventure took us to Lynn Canyon Park on the north side of town where we walked across this suspension bridge a few times as well as wandered through a few other trails.

On our last night, we sat at this beach and watched Brazil compete in the Honda Celebration of Light - a fireworks competition. Throngs of people came along to watch the show which started after dark (10:00 p.m.) and lasted for 30 minutes. This photo not only shows our vantage site, but also how cloudy it was for part of our visit. We appreciated the cool weather.