We stayed in North Vancouver, so we ate breakfast at Lonsdale Quay every morning. There’s a little coffee shop that sells dome shaped donuts where I had a killer scone fresh out of the oven.
For outdoor stuff, we went to Stanley Park for an afternoon-long walk, went to the Nitobe Garden over at UBC, and went up to Grouse Mountain. Wish we’d gone to the mountain in summer so we could have seen the bears they keep up there.
We nerded out and visited the TRIUMF particle accelerator. It’s awesome that you can just drop in for a free tour. We got lucky and had one of the head scientists because a researcher from Fermilab was there on the same day. We actually wandered around UBC quite a bit. It was interesting to see how campus differed from our alma mater. We were surprised to see a full bar in the on-campus restaurants. They were similar in landscape (big, sprawling, tons of green space), though other than a really cool building sunk into the ground at UBC that we had fun taking pictures of, the architecture is more cohesive than that on our campus.
On Sunday morning we went to service at Bethlehem Lutheran (it’s a sister church to our synod at home). The service was of course familiar and we used the same hymnals, but the pastor was Irish (and wore different robes than they do here), the older ladies spoke mostly in German, and more people than we would have guessed knew our pastors from back home. They were ridiculously welcoming! They told us to call ahead next time so someone could set us a place at their table for lunch.
We spent some time wandering around the downtown neighborhoods, and on Granville Island and the surrounding area. The Egman insisted we check out the library because they use the outside of it in Fringe as the FBI headquarters, and I picked up a temporary library card so we could use the internet to plan our bus routes for the rest of the day (and I wanted another for my card collection). Most of the time we just enjoyed puttering about taking pictures, watching a Canucks game at a crowded bar with great food, discovering poutine and fresh seafood that we don’t get at home, and other mostly just relaxing non-touristy things.
Also, the transit system is great, and I now want dollar and two dollar coins to be a thing here.
We didn’t see everything we wanted to, so we’ll probably go back someday. Probably in summer next time. I didn’t mind that it was cloudy & drizzly, but it was pretty chilly in March/April when we could get away from work.
Hopefully we didn’t miss anything too critical!
