When we left our bed and breakfast, we headed down to the waterfront to find the hop-on-hop-off tour bus. It’s a highly efficient way to travel the noteworthy things in a city without too much worry. We hopped on with a driver who was a non-native English speaker, and he recommended that we wear our complimentary headphones and plug them into channel two. Not the most charismatic fellow. We left his bus in Stanley park.
Stanley Park is named after the same Lord Stanley as the hockey Stanley Cup. Popular guy for naming things. His park is pretty spectacular. We got there and almost immediately got on a horse-drawn carriage tour. The two horses pulling us were brothers from an Amish farm in Iowa, and they were named Tom and Tony. Tom was highly distractible, while Tony was just a little bit lazy, and happy to let his brother do the work. What a pair.
Anyhow, after we parted ways with Tom and Tony, Cas and I walked through the park for a while, taking the opportunity to travel along several trails.
We finally got back on the on-again-off-again bus, and somehow, we ended up with the same unenthused driver. We got off again a few stops later and waited around (in a bar with good sangria) for a different driver. Mission accomplinshed. We got the very best driver that time around. He turned off the tourist track that piped through the other driver’s headphones and told us about the city. He was friendly, engaging and full of just enough local knowledge to make the trip very interesting. We didn’t want to hop back off until his route was complete, so we didn’t.
He took us to the spot at the waterfront where we started the adventure, and that left us just a little distance from the site of our dinner cruise. We asked our friendly bus driver if he thought we could make the walk in the 30 minutes we had remaining, and he said we could definitely do that. We failed to mention that we needed to factor in a bathroom break. We just made it in time, but the pace was a bit rushed. The supremely frustrating part, though, was that after the mad dash to arrive in time to board, the crew delayed boarding an extra 15 minutes. We didn’t need to rush- we could have strolled along the sea wall. Either way, we made it. We boarded the Brittania, which I halfway thought could have been called the Lord Stanley.
The dinner cruise folks must have picked up on something when they booked our tickets- maybe Cas and I give off a honeymooner vibe two years into marriage- because they stuck us at a table for two at the end of a row. Kind of perfect, actually. We pulled one chair around to the side and sat together, looking out the window at the city.We also took a few different trips up to the open air deck above the dining space.
The meal was very good, the drinks were nice and the entertainment was fitting for the place. They had an acoustic duo singing mellow music.
Our whole wish was to see a pretty sunset out on the water. Nailed it:
We’re just getting up for our last day in Vancouver now. We’ll have our breakfast and head out to see the Capilano Suspension Bridge before moving on after dinner to the train station. The Via Rail system is the name of Canada’s passenger train company, and they have a rather famous one that goes on an east-west track. It heads through the Canadian Rockies and probably well past our final departure in Toronto. The funny thing is that everyone here has heard of it, but nobody seems to know the name of the train. Our booking information said it is called “The Canadian.” Doesn’t get more straightforward than that. Kind of a missed opportunity for old Lord Stanley, if you ask me.
Anyhow, it’s time for some pancakes, I believe, and maybe a little syrup.
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