Friday started out rainy again (actually it never stopped) and Pauline had an early start too, so I dropped her at the conference centre at 8:30 and then had to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. I drove to the other end of downtown and parked near the Vancouver Central Library. I brought my wide angle lens with me on the trip solely to take pictures of the library. It’s designed like a Roman Coliseum but the only fighting inside it was between the striking library workers and the government. For the other 99% of the time, my camera had on a lens I bought a couple weeks earlier, a 17-50mm f/2.8 Tamron that worked quite well. Although, sometimes I wanted more reach, but the f/2.8 came in handy many times.

The rain had cleared up a bit, but not the clouds, and I figured that I would have to go back to the library at the end of the day so I decided to walk on for now. I walked down to Yaletown which is a recovered industrial area now turned into high rent trendy bar/shops area. I suppose an equivalent would be Seattle’s Belltown but I have no idea what it would be in Toronto. It was pretty dead early in the morning, with only people in Starbucks. As I made my way south, I eventually made it to the bottom of the island and found a boardwalk. So I figured, cool, I’ll take a walk along it. It turns out that I was on the Sea Wall and I ended up walking along it until Stanley Park passing by English Bay. I had flipped through the attractions book at the hotel to get an idea of what to see indoors in the rain, and they had English Bay amongst the attractions. The autumn trees were pretty nice there.

I continued north, bypassing Stanley Park, towards the northwestern end of the island where the Westin Bayshore was. But by then, it had started to rain again and so I just continued on my way along West Georgia St to Pacific Place, which is an underground mall in the downtown core. I took a break, dried off and had lunch before heading onto the Skytrain to the waterfront. The Skytrain is basically a light rail transit that runs underground under the core and in the sky in the suburbs. A neat thing about the transit system in Vancouver is that there’s a Seabus which takes passengers from downtown to the north shore. That was my destination so I rode the Seabus over to Lonsdale Quay. The Seabus is the Hummer of ferries — it’s really wide (but not multileveled).

Lonsdale Quay is kind of like Queen’s Quay with lots of arts and crafts boutiques. The only interesting thing here was that there was a 4 story tower which you can climb to look across towards Vancouver. After killing some time there, I rode the Seabus back across to the city, wandered around the downtown area to waste some more time and then headed back to the library because the sun (well just blue skies really) finally came out. Yay for patience.

I picked up Pauline at 4:30 and we headed over to the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. It had started raining again so the park had was foggy and had a Blair Witch Project feel. The suspension bridge at Lynn Canyon is narrower and shorter than the one at Capilano, but there were fewer people (although I’m not sure if that has to do with the weather). For dinner we went to Sushi-man which ironically was run by Chinese people.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, travelling, vancouver