A few more images from the City of Glass!
All of these photos – as well as the images in the previous post – were taken from the window of our hotel room in Coal Harbour.
Cool – huh?!
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To Vancouver last weekend for a work event…
That is one of The Girl’s work events, of course. I only work from home these days – and more power to that – but The Girl’s new venture is sending her darting about hither and thither just at the moment and on this occasion I went along for the ride.
We were kept pretty busy eventing (which all went pretty well, as far as I was able to ascertain) but we still had time to dine out in a manner to which we are no longer as accustomed as once we were (probably a good thing!)
We didn’t get to do much more than that in Vancouver (unless you count a fairly brief visit to IKEA on the way back) but given that the weather was pretty terrible (blowing half a gale in the Georgia Strait) that was a good call.
When the cloud cover blew away late in the day I thought I would take some photos from our room of the early evening light playing on downtown Vancouver’s signature glass edifices. Herewith some examples:
To Vancouver for the weekend – to see Peter Gabriel at the Rogers Arena. More on that in the next post – but first, some images of what Douglas Coupland quite understandably calls the ‘City of Glass’. Vancouver has that ‘big city’ feel – much more imposing than quaint little old Victoria.
Visitors always want to know why Victoria is the provincial capital of British Columbia and not Vancouver. Not much to be said there – except that it is what it is. Personally – eager as I am to absorb the big city vibes for a while, I am always much happier when we get back to the island.
But then – I do come from island people…
Tags: Music, Peter Gabriel, Photo, Travel, Vancouver
My apologies! I have of late been falling down on my blogging duties. I offer as no more than a feeble excuse that things have been in-feasibly and, perhaps, unexpectedly busy of late. The Winter term at College has been building to its climax; we have been entertaining friends from abroad (more of that in a further post) and I have been trying to get a grip on all that is going on in the garden – between bouts of (less-unexpectedly) inclement weather.
I know… poor show all round!
I did promise more on the trip to Vancouver that featured in my last post. I took some photos and, whilst they are not that exciting, I will nonetheless share them with (ie – force them upon) the gentle reader.
As I mentioned in that previous post, the purpose of the visit was for The Girl to attend a conference organised by her First Nation at one of Vancouver’s hotels/conference centres. The event was very well organised and well attended – and clearly yielded extremely positive results.
The business side of things did not, however, prevent The Girl and I getting out on the first evening for a splendid romantic dinner at Cardero’s in Coal Harbour. Whilst The Girl tucked into the scallops I enjoyed a lovely piece of European Sea Bass (not that easy to find on the west coast) and we shared a really rather decent Chablis. Nice atmosphere too:
On the Saturday – whilst The Girl was engaged in her sessions – I pretty much stayed in our room, watching the matches of the final weekend of the 2022 Six Nations tournament. Well done to the French on a thoroughly deserved (if also widely predicted) Grand Slam – and the less said about the Scots (who seem to have regressed by about three years!) the better!
This chap – outside our fourteenth floor window – seemed keen to know the scores as well:
The trip was a good one – with yet more familial contacts made by The Girl – plus the opportunity to have breakfast with a dear friend who now lives in VanCity. For my part it was actually a pretty good rest to be able to relax in a decent hotel room up in the clouds high above the west end of the city.
Tags: Dining, Friends, Holiday, Photo, Rugby, Six Nations, The Girl, Vancouver
The last two days of our brief but highly pleasurable visit to the mainland were dedicated to visiting some of The Girl’s family – for the first time since the pandemic began. On the Sunday we had a most enjoyable dinner in Port Moody with cousins and then on the Monday retraced our footsteps to North Vancouver to pay a call on The Girl’s ninety five year old aunt. It was wonderful to sense just a glimmer of normality after such a long time with little but our own company – vastly pleasurable as that always is.
We had made only the most tenuous of plans for the last day so had not booked a place on a ferry crossing to the island, guessing that the Monday would be fairly quiet and that we could just pitch up and jump aboard.
Wrong!
As The Girl negotiated the maze of routes out of Vancouver towards Tsawwassen I looked up the status of the sailings on the InterWebNet. At this time of year ferries depart hourly – on the hour – but we could see that the 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock sailings were already full. As The Girl put the ‘pedal to the metal’ (she likes that!) we watched the rolling updates from BC ferries indicate that the 3 o’clock was filling rapidly and that the 4 o’clock was not far behind. When we finally reached the terminal at Tsawwassen we we told we might be on the 4 pm or it might be the 5 pm!
Having not yet had lunch and mindful of the long wait to come we headed for the terminal building to source ourselves some victuals – only to discover that a power failure had resulted in all of the concessions being closed – barring the confectionery stand and they were only able to take cash as all of the machines were ‘hors de combat’.
Bah!
That was not the most healthy repast that we have ever consumed.
No matter – we were determined not to let such small things spoil a most enjoyable trip and we were soon home again.
A final flurry of images from the journey home.
The third day of our sojourn in and around Vancouver was dedicated to seeing again the dear friend who lived with us for a period at the start of 2020 and is now based in North Vancouver. The limitations imposed by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic – and in particular the need to restrict oneself to strict social ‘bubbles’ – have meant that, though some of our dear friend’s furniture yet lives with us, we have not been able to see her since she moved out last summer.
Now that the restrictions have been eased we very much wanted to get together again – and we duly set off across the Lion’s Gate bridge in the directions of ‘North Van’.
The form for the day was a drive up the southern half of the ‘Sea to Sky Highway’ to Squamish for a spot of lunch. I have not previously traveled this route (which starts off along the east coast of the Howe Sound and which leads ultimately to Whistler) and looked forward to enjoying its beauties. The nature of the day and the sheer weight of traffic meant that stopping to take photos along the road was not realistic, but should you be interested this website gives a good and detailed introduction to the route.
I did snatch a couple of shots in Squamish but lunch and catching up were a far higher priority.
After lunch we visited Shannon Falls, which are but a stone’s throw from Squamish (should you be an Olympian and possessed of a very light stone). Shannon Falls is one of the highest in British Columbia – with a drop in excess of 800ft – and is classified as a horsetail fall, with multiple elements fanning out (like a horse’s tail) and with the water making frequent contact with the underlying rocks.
I have read subsequently that Shannon Falls – along with other similar types of waterfall – can be difficult to photograph convincingly – which explains (I hope!) why none of my shots really does it justice or truly captures the scale of it.
The standard of the photography aside – a jolly good day was had by all…
Two things occupied our time on the first full day of our recent visit to Vancouver.
The first was a visit to the Vancouver Convention Centre to view the ‘Imagine Van Gogh‘ exhibition, the which is described by the promoters – appropriately in our view – as an ‘immersive’ exhibition. This event has popped up in various places in North America and in all probability in other parts of the world also. We enjoyed it – particularly as one is able to see detail of the genius’s work in extreme close-up. I took these photos, which should give some idea of the scale of the thing. Do click on the images to see them on the largest possible scale…
In the evening The Girl and I dined at a rather lovely bar/bistro called ‘Tableau’. Though a week in advance of the actual date we had decided to treat this as our anniversary dinner and duly indulged ourselves in a thoroughly decent bottle of Chablis. The evening was considerably enhanced by the excellent service (and the complimentary fizz) provided in particular by the restaurant manager/sommelier who hails – as it turns out – from Chalfont St. Peter – a village within about five miles of where we used to live in South Buckinghamshire in the UK.
We thoroughly recommend Tableau should you find yourself in Vancouver.
Tags: Art, Dining, food and drink, Holiday, Photo, Travel, Vancouver
I have not of late had much opportunity to take photographs with my new camera (new this year!) other than in our garden or on walks in the locality. This is, of course, one of the many side effects of the pandemic. On our recent long weekend break in Vancouver I determined that I would rectify this and duly snapped away to my heart’s content. The results should offer a visual record of our few days away.
The best way to get to Vancouver from our home on Vancouver Island is to take the ferry from Swartz Bay (but a stone’s throw from where we live) to Tsawwassen on the mainland and then to drive into the centre of the city from there. This is not the only possible route but it is the most efficient.
The ferry journey takes only around 90 minutes but is a particularly pretty crossing, passing as it does through the Gulf Islands. At about the halfway point the ferry route passes through a narrow and fast flowing tidal passage, between Galiano and Mayne Islands, which is called Active Pass. At this point the ferry crosses the equivalent sailing going in the opposite direction, but I have of late noticed that it also coincides with other smaller ferries serving the Gulf Islands themselves.
Here we are in a dance with three other ferries in Active Pass:
As I described in my last post, The Girl had found for us a splendid 23rd floor apartment at Carmana Plaza in Coal Harbour which is not only extremely comfortable and well equipped but which also has excellent views of the West End and English Bay:
The first day on leave was inevitably much occupied with travel, settling in and eating, but we did also have the opportunity to get a little shopping in. This example (replenishing my much loved Molton Brown hand-wash at Holt Renfrew) gave me the opportunity to play with another acquisition – a new macro lens that I picked up on the way into Vancouver.
Pretty neat, huh?
More pictures next time…
“Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn’t exist, but it does. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Douglas Coupland
It is but two weeks since The Girl and I left Vancouver Island for the first time in over a year for our rapid-fire visit to Kamloops – and yet here we are again already… away from our island home.
It is the pandemic – of course – that has kept us on the island until very recently, but we are both now fully vaccinated and the relaxation of the BC lockdown has enabled us to take some very careful steps back into the outside world.
The trip to Kamloops did not go quite as we had originally planned. We had intended to stay there for several nights, encompassing the event for which we had gone. As things turned out the fresh wild-fire at Sun Peaks overnight on the Saturday filled the valley in which Kamloops nestles with thick smoke on the Sunday morning, forcing us soft coastal dwellers to beat a hasty retreat back to the island. This meant two consecutive days of pretty heavy driving and our arriving back on the peninsula not until around 10:00pm.
The Kamloops trip came up fairly late on, but we had already planned a long-weekend away in the City of Glass – Vancouver – as a sort of ‘welcome back to the world’ – given that we knew that we would not be travelling further afield this year. The idea was to have a relaxing city break – to re-meet old friends and family with whom we have not been able to connect of late – to wine and dine ourselves and – mayhap – to take in a little culture.
I am writing this on the Saturday evening in the 23rd floor suite that The Girl (to whom I inevitably leave these important decisions) found for us in Coal Harbour in Vancouver, overlooking the West End and English Bay. I have the camera with me and have been making liberal use of it. I will regale you with the results and details of what we got up to once we are back home next week.
So – welcome (carefully) indeed back to the world…
There clearly comes an age (though at what point this occurs I am not exactly sure) that the notion of one’s bucket list and the contents thereof emerges as a key concept. In all probability this happens on a sort of sliding scale, becoming more and more important as the years pass by and as an increasingly unacceptable percentage of the items on that list remain unaccomplished.
I mentioned in a post earlier in the year that an unexpected opportunity had arisen to see live for the first time a favourite band of mine – Simple Minds. Now – that missive was posted all the way back in April, such being the nature of the modern concert going experience that one must needs book one’s ticket half a year and more in advance if one is to have any chance at all of attending said event (at a sensible cost!). Still – it gives one something to which to look forward.
Having gazed steadfastly in the aforementioned direction throughout the summer and well into the autumn (fall) a couple of Mondays since found me ensconced on the ferry to Tsawwassen on my way to Vancouver for the long-awaited concert. The Girl was not – on this occasion – with me. This was a considerable ‘bummer’ as all things are better and more fun in her company, but when I had booked the tickets back in April she was mulling other plans. I mentioned in a previous post that she celebrated but a month ago a most significant birthday and she had originally been planning a trip abroad with a friend (on which I could not go because of my teaching!). By the time that adventure had unfortunately fallen through it was too late to get a ticket for the concert.
I thus found myself alone (amongst three thousand other eager souls) in the splendid Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on a rainy late-October Monday evening. The Orpheum – designed by Scottish architect Marcus Priteca back in the 1920s – is home to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and is a National Historic Site of Canada.
The Orpheum is considered to have excellent acoustics but, whilst that may be true for classical concerts, I was not entirely convinced from my seat underneath the overhang of the balcony. It may have been that the sound engineer had different ideas to me as to what constitutes a good sound, or it might be that the area underneath the balcony traps certain frequencies; in any case it became apparent even from the pre-concert melange of 80s hits that the sound (played at what was for me too high a level to start with) comprised a great deal of low bass and a superfluity of unpleasantly aggressive high-mids, with a considerable gap in between in which important details were lost.
I had, fortunately, taken with me my musicians’ ear protectors, which enabled me to enjoy the concert, though at the cost of feeling slightly distanced from it throughout. Given the incredible quality of modern concert sound systems this was something of a shame – though I should say at once that the Minds were on excellent form and that they themselves were fantastic throughout. They played pretty much everything I was hoping to hear and it became clear that Jim (Kerr – founder member and vocalist) didn’t want to go home. Towards the end of an extended set of encores he enquired pleadingly of the crowd:
“Can we do one more?“.
Best moment of the evening? During the inevitable ‘Alive and Kicking‘ – as Jim conducted the eager fans in the extended “La, la, la…” singalong – he cracked everybody up by calling in broad Glaswegian:
“OK – now sing it in French!“.
Priceless!
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