Day 3: Stanley Park and Grouse Mountain

Our family tradition is to plan about two days of activity for every calendar day. We carried on the tradition today.

We headed out fairly early to Stanley Park, the gigantic city park on the northwest end of downtown. Stanley Park has beaches, pools, acres and acres of woods, an aquarium, six miles of seawall for walking and biking and much more.

Our plan was to walk part way to the park and then to catch the 19 bus right into the park. Unfortunately, the first 19 bus we saw was full and drove by the crowded bus stop.

An aside about public transportation in Vancouver. It's great and well used which means the buses are often packed. It's also expensive.

So we wound up walking all the way into the park. We wanted to ride the free park shuttle bus to the Ravine Trail which is about one-third of the way around the park. It turns out that thousands of tourists and half the population of Vancouver were in the park today.The first shuttle bus we saw was full, of course, and drove by our stop. Luckily the second bus had room for us and we got to the trail fairly quickly.

Once we walked into the woods we were almost alone. The forests are old Fir and Cedar and very cool and quiet considering the crowds nearby. We walked to Beaver Lake then north to Prospect Point where we ran into the tour bus crowd. We dodged the picture takers and saw the views, then picknicked nearby on the food we got on Granville Island. We took the shuttle to Third Beach and walked the seawall back to the edge of the park.

We found a bus stop and waited for a 19, hoping that the bus would be empty when it left the park. Instead a 9 drove up so we asked the driver whether this bus would get us to the Seabus terminal. He said "I'll take you to the Seabus terminal." Great!

In fact all sorts of people got on the bus as we went down the street and when they asked if the bus went to a certan place the bus driver replied "I'll take you there." I realized at that point that we were on the Night Bus from Harry Potter and this was a much older Stan Shunpike.

We crossed English Bay on the Seabus (part of the public transportation system) and took a bus up to Grouse Mountain. My spouse, who is scared of precipices had agreed to take the Skyride, a big cable car that goes about 1000 feet straight up. The view of Vancouver is spectacular from the car. This was a pricey experience so we were hoping for interesting things at the top.

When we got up to the top we saw what the exta value entertainment was...a lumberjack show, a bird show, and a caged bear. Lame. We wandered a little until Sally pointed in a different direction and said "Is that Ranier?" From that place we had an incredible view of the chain of volcanoes in WA and OR. There was, of course, a layer of haze that obscured anything below a few thousand feet but the mountains were clear. We could see Mount Saint Helens and (we thought) Mt. Adams beyond Ranier. We were disappointed that we couldn't see Mt. Hood so we started up a steep ski train to try to get a better view. We got close to the summit of Grouse Mt. but still didn't see Mt. Hood so we gave up and headed down.

We went down the mountain, took the bus and the ferry and wound up back in Vancouver. We decided to eat somewhere on the walk back to the hotel so we took the busy Burrell street across town. About halfway back we crossed Robson St, the main shopping district. It was 8 p.m. on a Sunday night but the street was packed with people who I think were all shopping. They were probably all tourists since the city is crammed with them. We found a sushi place, wandered home and that's it.