Various Vancouver The end is near. The last whole day in Vancouver began with a breakfast somewhere down in Robson street, I don't remember the name of the place. We had scrambled eggs, sausages, baked potatoes and toast, which is quite normal if you are Canadian but to our standards quite bizarre. Nonetheless, it provided the necessary energy to cope with the plans we had to rummage about Vancouver. And boy did we do Vancouver. Gastown, where it all began with some nice old buildings dating back to late 1800 and cobblestone streets. From Gastown we went exploring Vancouver's Chinatown and entered the serene quiet Dr Sun Yat-Sen Clasical Chinese garden. A must see, even though tranquility in the middle of a busy town is a relative concept. We browsed around a bit and we saw ... read more

It was an interesting visit to the Nk'Mip Desert and Heritage Centre. Developed by the Osoyoos Indian Band provides a guided tour of showing their cultural heritage and how they used the vegetation of this desert like area. There is also a sort of reconstructed village and nice metal statues of indian statues. We left Osoyoos to drive to Buckley a little town near Seattle where my cousin Grace (Greetje) lives. The landscape changed from desert into a more "normal" scenery again with spruce trees. Traffic became also more heavy. We arrived at their residence early in the evening and the reunion was heartwarming. The next day we went for breakfast to the "Mad dog cafe" somewhere in a small town called Bonney Lake near their place. Next we visited the "Puallup Fair" which was huge, ... read more

Friday september 18th. We are now in the wine area in the Okanaga valley. Great. We are now on our way to my cousin Grace, she -and her husband Bert-, lives in the neighbourhood of Seattle. So we have to cross the border with the USA, I hope that we will not have too much hassle. Sunday we will be heading there. Yesterday we had a rest day in Revelstoke, it provided a relief to be there. We walked through the center of the town to sniff the typical atmosphere. Today we arrived at Oliver in wine country! This is a peculiar area, did you know that you can do a wine tasting, skiing down a mountain and playing golf at one and the same day? Weird. On the way to Oliver we did a wine ... read more

This day (tuesday 15th) we first had to do some errants as we were out of almost everything and you gotta eat. So, we went to the local supermarket "Sobeys" in Golden. Our muscles surprisingly didn't ache that much so we felt good enough to do some less streneous hikes. We drove back to Yoho National park to Emerald Lake and had a nice relaxed walk around it. The first half part we walked through rain forest and there were some spectecular mirror views on the lake. The lake gets it color from light reflecting off the fine glacial rock particles. There was hardly any wind so the surface of the lake acted as a perfect mirror. This allowed me to take some nice shots. Thereafter we had picnic lunch again with all kinds of tasty ... read more

The past few days we've been cut off from civilization. No internet. So here is an update what we've been doing since the arrival in the Kiska Inn B&B in Dead Man's Flats. Banff and around was on our todo list. The first thing we did was to take the gondola up sulphur mountain (2281m) which gives a nice view on Banff and on several other summits of mountains. The upper terminal looks like something from an old James Bond movie (quote Lonely Planet) and has the expected restaurant with awful coffee. I made a panorama photo using my tripod and new camera fiddling around with some of the metering. I have to wait until we get back to compute the result. After that we went down we had a picnic lunch in the Cascade Gardens, ... read more