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Published: October 25th 2013
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Horseshoe Bay
British Columbia, Canada October 23, 2013
This morning I enjoyed a coffee and great conversation with the brother of my best and oldest friend. He’s been living out here for 8 years with his wife and 19-year-old son. I left feeling slightly envious that he gets to stay here after we’ve gone home. Still, the other part of me is looking forward to getting home again, seeing family and friends, not to mention our cat, not living out of a suitcase etc, etc (as well as my electric toothbrush! My teeth have missed you!).
It’s a beautiful, cloudless day today and we feel incredibly grateful and privileged that we are able to enjoy our last days in this great city in such perfect, autumnal weather. (Either that or it will make it even harder to leave!).
We drive out of downtown over Lions Gate Bridge and through West Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay where we stop for a spot of lunch and then it’s onto Stawamus Chief.
The Chief is a granite dome 700 m above the waters of Howe Sound. Apparently claimed by some to be the “second largest granite monolith in the world” next to El Capitan
in Yosemite. The “Squamesh”, indigenous people from the area, consider the Chief to be a place of spiritual significance. It’s certainly quite a moving experience, standing on the top looking down!
It’s a popular hike offering amazing views of Howe Sound and the mountains in Garibaldi Provincial Park. You can hike all three peaks or just the South Peak and that’s what we did.
It’s a tough old climb and as the sign at the bottom says, “This trail is no walk in the park” and as you get near the top there’s a lot of proper climbing and scrambling to be done before you’re standing on the very peak. But it’s a good cardiovascular workout and since we did it some 20 years ago they’ve replaced and introduced new wooden steps and even a couple of iron ladders and chains to grab hold off.
The view and benefits of the workout is reward enough for the hard slog up and standing (or sitting as I preferred to do!) precariously on top of a rocky peninsular with nothing between you and a sheer drop 600m down is quite awe inspiring (you just want to make sure you
A Foggy Vancouver
From Cypress Mtn, West Vancouver know where the kids are!).
Once down again, our legs feeling like jelly from the steep descent, we go in search of our usual reward of a DQ ice-cream but alas it turns out there isn’t one in Squamish (or so we’re told) so we head back into Vancouver and decide to take a detour on account of the fascinating fog that is slowly but surely swallowing up downtown Vancouver. We drive up to the lookout on Cypress and join a number of people all with the same idea in mind it seems. The fog has settled on the sea, seemingly filling in the gap between the mainland and Vancouver Island and it’s moving slowly but surely towards downtown, engulfing parks and buildings as it goes. Lions Gate slowly disappears before our eyes. The fog is low but dense so we can see everything above it including a wonderfully clear view of Mount Baker in Washington.
As we drive back down into West Vancouver you’ll be so pleased to hear we do find our DQ and then, predictably, get well and truly caught up in the traffic jam over Lions Gate Bridge. What it does mean though is
that we’ve given the sun time to set and as we drive over the bridge and through the park (the long way round) we get a fantastic view of a foggy sea with a band of glorious red, orange sinking into it. Like the view from a plane as it flies above the cloud level as the sun goes down.
October 24, 2013
Our last full day in Vancouver and we decide to leave the car behind and walk around Stanley Park. If you do it all it’s a 9 km walk (excluding the 3 km to and from the hotel) and we pretty much do it all except we have to follow a detour at the far end thanks to work being done on the seawall cliffs. The weather was perfect again although the threat of fog was still there, beginning to creep in across English Bay, making for a wonderfully atmospheric walk as we started walking in an anti-clockwise direction around the park. The fog was devouring Lions Gate and hanging over the water between downtown and North Van, concealing a variety of water vessels that occasionally became visible as they sounded
their horns and appeared out of the mist like ghost ships. The cars on Lions Gate were disappearing into their own blanket of white as they drove across.
As we crossed over the park, through the forest, things became decidedly chillier as we descended into the fog, walking along the shoreline, listening to the lapping of the waves but not being able to make out much beyond the shallows.
We walked past Lost Lagoon to have one last glimpse of the resident raccoon there (who swam across the water while we watched) and then up Robson where we treated ourselves to a Red Robin Burger for all the walking we’d done.
A lovely last day in this wonderful city but alas tomorrow we check out of the Landis, the compensation for leaving being that we don’t fly directly home but via New York City for a couple of days of exploring before returning to the UK. Ah, Canada, we’ll miss you for sure. Until the next time…….
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