belated vancouver news

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so its been a while but this time we have a good excuse, we've been up in the rockies for a week with no internet access! before that though we have been doing loads of stuff around vancouver.
We arrived late on the bus from seattle, causing minor stress to everyone here as there was confusion to which bus we should have been on and we haven't managed to work out how canadians can call our 'cell phones', so no-one could get in contact with us. we were blissfully unaware of this and were peacefully sleeping up the back of the bus, or at least stephanie was!
Stephanie's aunt and uncle (Betty and Dave) have been looking after us really well, cooking breakfast and dinner for us and gracefully allowing us to win at crib!
The weather was lovely when we first got here and we visited granville island, which has a massive market full of individual little shops selling all sorts of stuff. They also served a scoop of ice cream sandwiched between two cookies! That made my day!
For my birthday (not the surprise part organised by Stephanie) we went into Stanley park and hired some bikes to cycle round it. the views were amazing (we'll post some pics soon). We saw a raccoon too and it posed for us! We came back out to Burnaby and had a chinese with Betty and Dave. That was about it for my actual birthday as we spent a fair bit of time doing webcam sessions and it was good to see everyone and speak to you all.
The thursday was my surprise day. We left the house and I had no idea where we were heading. We got on a bus that took us up to Horseshoe Bay and heading across to Bowen Island on the ferry. The island was very small but we walked to the lake in the centre via the salmon spawning ground (closed!) for lunch then walked through the forest paths to a waterfall and fish ladder before going to the beach and having our first swim of the holiday. We caught the ferry back across the fjord (Howe Sound) and headed to the seafood restaurant. we shared a starter of lobster and then Stephanie had salmon scallopinis with lemon caper butter while i had a West Coast sampler with three different fish on it, one of which was a bit too slimy for my liking (smoked black cod?). Even after bubbly cocktails there was still room for pudding off apple tart for Stephanie and apple and cranberry crumble for me. the food was amazing and then we caught the bus back to Vancouver to round off a wonderful day!
We headed to the beach on friday since it was giving 30degrees however the cloud cover put a dent in the plan but we braved it out, including a swim, for about an hour before deciding to return another day when the weather improved. Instead we headed to the cinema in town and saw Pineapple Express.
On saturday we headed to the PNE. A big fair held once a year for about a month to end the school summer holidays. It was free entry before 12 and we saw some SuperDogs and the Westcoast Chainsaw Lumberjack show. They also had loads of stalls with various things for sale so we had a look round but it was toasty warm so was quite a lazy day. We did want to see the Peking acrobats but started queueing at 12.15 for the 12.30 show or so we thought. In fact people were already queueing for the 2pm show and we weren't that fussed about the acrobatics.

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