Vancouver aka Raincouver

Well Vancouver certainly lived up to its wet reputation; it rained 3 out of the 5 days we were there! Fortunately for us, we were travelling to/from the city for 2 of those days and also really needed a day where we didn’t do very much to catch up on emails and have a bit of a rest.

The forecast for our first full day was good so we spent it just wandering around, checking out the sites taking in Canada Place, Gastown, Robson Street, and parts of the Seawall by Coal Harbour. We found the visitor centre to be very helpful, including their provision of a ‘cheat sheet’ for getting to and from popular locations.

Digital Orca Vancouver — Stewart was disappointed to discover that the Digital Orca aka the ‘Lego Orca’ was in fact not made of Lego

Vancouver Olympic Cauldron — The Olympic Cauldron, a permanent reminder that Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010. It’s only lit on special occasions – clearly our visit wasn’t important enough.

Vancouver skyline — Proof that the sun does come out sometimes!

We ended the day with our first foreign cinema experience (it’s exactly the same as it is in England) and went to watch Gone Girl. According to the ‘MapMyWalk’ app we clocked up over 15 miles by the time we got home which made us feel a lot less guilty about eating the bargain Lindt chocolate bar we found at London Drugs (the equivalent of Superdrug mixed with a Tesco Express). It was good to have some proper chocolate at last.

Kitsilano Beach

On our second day in Vancouver, the weather had taken a turn for the worse and it chucked it down for pretty much the entire day. We managed to escape the apartment and catching up with boring admin, by taking a look at the beach for a couple of hours when it stopped raining. Kitsilano (Kits for short) Beach is one of Vancouver’s most popular beaches in the summer, and was only a couple of blocks away, but we pretty much had it to ourselves in the drizzle!

Capilano Suspension Bridge Park

Desperate to get outside again we were pleased the rain had eased on our final day so we caught the free shuttle bus from downtown Vancouver to the Capilano Suspension Bridge. Despite being incredibly touristy, we enjoyed our time here – it was good fun and well thought out with lots of interesting information boards. Shame the ‘famous homemade fudge’ in the gift shop was crap. We didn’t buy any having sampled it (we didn’t want you to think that we had bought some).

Capilano Suspension Bridge Park — The obligatory tourist shots: standing next to a giant bear, measuring my wing span and pretending to fall off one of the Treetop Adventure suspension bridges

Cliffwalk Capilano Suspension Bridge Park — The Cliffwalk: a narrow and high walkway on the side of the cliffs. The leaflet gave the impression that there was a glass floor the whole way along but in reality it was only a tiny section.

Once we made it over the 137m bridge, 70m above the Capilano River we got to do what was possibly the best activity there – the Treetop Adventure. This offered us a squirrel eye view of the coastal rainforest surrounding us from a series of much smaller suspension bridges, which were attached to 250 year old Douglas-fir trees.