London to Vancouver, via Iceland

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R: So, to be clear, I'm not going to do this every day. But today is the first real day we are here. After seeing an upsetting number of Christmas trees at Heathrow, the trip out was smooth. Our Airbnb place is amazing. We are right in the downtown area of Vancouver about 2 mins walk from the Vancouver lookout tower (which Cate bought me tickets to for our anniversary). It's a whole apartment to ourselves - it has no view out, being the only snag. But so far very impressed with Airbnb.



We decided to follow the walking tour in the guidebook to start, then went a bit off piste as the day unfolded. The weather is pretty dull, which is a shame because we can't see the mountain scenery around us. The city is nice, clean and liveable ... The Autumn colours are incredible - you can see why they have the red maple for their flag here. Its street after street of bright reds and yellows. Anyway, we've explored the downtown area, into the trendy upcoming warehouse district of Yaletown, up to Chinatown (which had a great Chinese garden but a pretty dull arch, as Chinatowns go, in my opinion), across to Granville Island which was a bit like an indoor Borough Market rolled into Covent Garden. They weren't too keen on the free sample idea though! They have bizarre little sea bus boats here that look like that children's toy boat you always had in the bath. We used these to get across to the island whilst raining and one of them had a 5 year old at the helm...



We headed to the West end after that to see the posh old style houses in Barclay Square then wandered home in the rain via Robson Street which is full of designer outlets looking bedraggled.



I nearly got Cate into a cafe in Chinatown that served chicken feet on the specials. One day I'll manage it, but today we had pasta in the shadow of a disused tram carriage.



Evening in tonight to plan the next stages....

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Photos

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City sky in autumn

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Yaletown

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Fall Colour in the Chinese gardens

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More fall colour

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Hoots mon!