Vancouver BC Trip

This past weekend I took a trip to Vancouver BC. Ever since I drove through it on the way to Whistler, I've really wanted to go. Anna had a 3 day weekend so we both headed up there on Friday morning.

Friday
It took us roughly 5 1/2 hours to get there. I had done the Priceline thing and bid for a 4-star hotel in the downtown area for $90 a night... and they accepted it at the Mariott (usually $200+ a night). So we headed to our hotel, dropped off our stuff, and decided to check out some of the city.

It was sort of rainy, but it was still nice.First location was Stanley Park (right outside of downtown). It's fairly similar to Washington Park although smaller and a bit more groomed. Still, we drove through, took pictures and enjoyed the scenery. Then we looped back and forth several times trying to figure out how to get onto the bridge to North Vancouver. From there, we went to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which was a cool little park where they had suspension bridges and platforms in the trees. After spending some time there, we headed back downtown and went back to the hotel again. We decided to eat dinner in this cool area that reminded me of the 23rd, 21st area in Portland. We ate a Japanese restaurant called Kingyo that looked kind of crappy from the outside... but was awesome on the inside. If I lived in Vancouver... it would have been the perfect date place (if I could ever get a date). Afterwards, we grabbed some dessert at this cool little dessert place called "True Confections" which had great desserts. Then headed back to the hotel. By this point, we were both incredibly tired so we headed to bed.

Saturday
Next morning, we woke up bright and early and headed out for breakfast and exploring the town. It was absolutely gorgeous out. We walked over to this little place called "GoodFellas" for breakfast and really liked it. Afterwards, we walked all over checking out the downtown area (malls, etc). We saw signs for their "Skytrain" which we thought would be cool. Turned out to be their subway system. We did see something about a Seabus... so we headed over towards the waterfront. Their Seabus is the ferry system that takes you over to North Vancouver, so we decided to do that.

On the other side was a little market and we just walked around the North Vancouver area for a couple hours. Finally, we headed back over to Downtown Vancouver again, and headed towards Gastown. Gastown is their older district, very tourist friendly. After walking down in that area for a while, we decided we were hungry so we went to "The Irish Heather". Very authentic and cool little Irish bar/restaurant, where we had good beer and great food. Anna was in love with the waiter there and probably would have left me in Vancouver friendless if he had asked her to stay. :) Next we decided to explore Gastown/Chinatown a bit more and ended up in this very unfriendly looking area that would have been very scary at night. After leaving that part of town, we headed to a cool little book store and then finally back to the hotel where we took a short nap.

After the nap, in true spirit of our geekiness, we spent a little time making a little picture story, which I will post probably later this weekend. In the process of doing this picture story though, I broke her camera and so we went out to get her a new camera. We decided to get smashed after that and headed back to the hotel and just crashed.

Sunday
The next morning (another gorgeous day), we got up, got our things together and piled everything in the car. After closing out... we made our way over to the Granville Public Market and had a blast. We ate a little place called the "Cats Meow" and then walked around the public market. There was a street performer performing all these juggling acts and just interacting with the audience. He was absolutely hilarious... and I haven't had a good laugh like that in a while. Somehow, I was picked out of the audience to be a participant in one of his stunts. Myself and a guy from Seattle had to perform a few little tricks... and then he brought out a strait-jacket where we had to make sure it was secure. Afterwards we had chains that we had to wrap around him and we put a lock on the chain. What seemed like a half-hour (an laughing the whole time as he kept making fun of us)... we head back into the audience as he pulls himself free. Apparently, he travels all over the world doing these performances and gets his money from donations after the show. We took a little more time around the market and then finally headed back to Portland.

Overall, it was a great trip! I really am glad I finally got to stay there and I probably will do the trip again sometime. I would recommend to anyone to take a trip up there!

Here are the pictures we took (minus our little story that we did):
Vancouver BC Pictures