September 2004 Last updated: 9/25/04 3:00pm PT
This is the big 11th annual honeymoon, which means it’s our 10th wedding anniversary. Wow! Can’t believe it has been 10 years already. This anniversary trip was to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It’s only about a 2 hour drive from our house.
Canada is fun. It’s like going to another country 🙂 The metric system is used and they have colorful money. We stayed in downtown Vancouver at the Listel Hotel. It’s nice, but not the four star hotel that it is rated as. The problem with fancy hotels is that they like to nickel and dime you to death. $1.00 for local calls, no free high speed Internet access. Good thing someone in the neighboring apartment building hadn’t figured out how to secure their wireless router. But the hotel is right in the heart of shopping and a ton of restaurants. I think it would take 4 months to try all the restaurants within a mile of the hotel. The weather is pretty much the same as in Seattle, so plan on rain, but don’t expect rain.
Here’s the downtown skyline and a picture of someone flying a huge kite.
On our way up, we stopped at the University of British Columbia. On campus is the Museum of Anthropology. The museum contains a lot of artifacts from various parts of the world, mostly focused on North America. Since it’s a university however, not a lot of the non-North American artifacts are labeled other than what country they are from. I guess they want the students to actually do some research. You won’t know “what” or “why”.
Dinner was at an excellent Malaysian restaurant called the Banana Leaf. The Pineapple Fried Rice is a must have. Served in a carved out half of a pineapple, the fried rice contains pineapple and raisins (among other things like shrimp and mussels), two things that you wouldn’t think would work, but this was a very tasty combination of flavors.
On Saturday morning, we rented bikes and rode around Stanley Park, a public park probably about equal in size to the downtown area.
We walked to an area called Gastown. There we bought a couple of small pieces of artwork by Sam Logan. He uses very interesting colors, almost cartoony, but the artwork is definitely not cartoony. Check out the link to see some of his work.
One picture below is of the Gastown Steam Clock. Powered by steam, it makes noise every 15 minutes. The clock is not as old as it looks. It was built in 1977 and is powered by steam from pipes that run underground to heat the buildings in the area. The other picture is the Harbour Centre Tower.
North of the city are mountains and canyons. We took a small hike around Lynn Canyon. Here’s Ed standing on a swinging bridge (Tall blonde pony-tail with the Mariners cap in the shadows).
We also drove about 45 minutes north of Vancouver to the B.C. Museum of Mining , where we went on a guided tour inside the old copper mine (1904-1974). Recommended. Lots of information from the tour guides, but the best part was when they turned out the lights deep inside the tunnels. PITCH BLACK! You could not see your hands in front of your face. Hard to believe that the old time miners use to only have a candle attached to their helmets.
