Biking through Vancouver
This year when Jenny asked me what I wanted for my birthday my mind became a complete blank and stayed that way. Usually all year long things will occur to me that I might possibly like to have and I should probably make a list of as potential gifts from my family who will not accept that really and truly I don't need anything new. When the daughters can't come up with anything for their own birthdays we can always give cash, but they can hardly give us money so I understand their dilemma. Luckily they are both creative and come up with wonderful things I would never have thought of myself. For example, this year Jenny, after scouring the internet, gave us a guided bike tour of Vancouver, an excellent gift if ever there was one.
We arrived in Vancouver on a Thursday and scheduled the tour for the following Sunday, depending on the weather. I called on Sunday morning and talked to Robert, the head of the touring company, because the weather didn't look too good. It was cold and cloudy and looked like rain. He assured me that it wouldn't rain so we arranged to be picked up at 2 pm. Our guide, Jennifer (which seemed like a good omen), was a lovely young woman who gathered us up, drove us to a parking lot on the edge of Stanley Park and fitted us out with bikes, helmuts and instructions. As we were still standing there it started to drizzle slightly. We decided to ignore it and took off.
Raindrops keep falling on my head....
Five minutes later we were standing under a tree watching the raindrops splash the waters around us. We were wet. The temperature was about 13 degrees (55F) and our spirit of adventure had abandoned us.
Luckily for us Jennifer suggested rescheduling the tour, which we thought was a great idea so she took us home, where we turned the heat up and were comforted by the knowledge that the weather in Germany was not any better. Robert, on the other hand, was not pleased by this development because once a tour starts you can't stop and decide to go on another day. To make a middling long story short, after some discussion he saw the light and picked us up himself on Tuesday around noon (and was very nice about it).
In the meantime the weather had improved and continued to improve over the length of our stay to the point that when we left the forecast was for 36 degrees for the next three days and we were glad to be returning to cooler weather. However, for the bike tour it was ideal, partly cloudy and not too warm. There were only three of us on the tour, us and a young man from southern California.
One of the first stops we made in Stanley Park was to view the totem poles, the first we had seen on this visit, but far from the last.
Last winter Vancouver had a terrible storm that destroyed a portion of the seawall and bike path so that we couldn't circumvent Stanley Park but had to cut through it. This way we saw more of the park, areas we would never have seen otherwise because they are fairly inaccessible.
A lot of the trees looked like a giant had tried his hand at making matchsticks. Someone had gone to the trouble of counting the rings on this particular stump and came up with the number 800, which of course meant it was "born" about 1200. How sad that such an old tree had to die. There were many others but I'm not sure if any were this old or maybe even older.
This is one section of the beach that I found fascinating. I'd never seen anything like it before. People had stacked rocks without using anything such as cement or glue. I didn't believe it at first but there were people there working on their towers. Robert told us it was a kind of therapy to teach people patience. Wow, I guess so.
Maybe this kind of therapy was inspired by the Inuit (the Canadian Eskimos) who make piles of rocks as signals. This particular formation stands for friendship and is the official symbol for the 2010 Olympics. It caused quite a bit of controversy because the local Indians felt slighted and many Canadians would have preferred to see the maple leaf used. Be that as it may, this symbol is now all over the place and its presence will only increase as the games draw nearer.
We continued on, leaving Stanley Park and coming to the much more populated area of Vancouver. Scorning the available bridges we climbed aboard this very cute ferry to make the five-minute journey across False Creek to Granville Island.
This is the island snuggled under the Granville Street Bridge. It used to be full of factories and industry but transformed itself in the 1970s into a tourist mecca. One of the main attractions in the public market where you can buy almost any kind of produce or seafood. We stopped for lunch here and I had a tuna wrap made from 100% flaxseed. It was quite tasty and the woman who sold it to me assured me that I would live much longer for having eaten it.
This is what Vancouver looks like from Granville Island. Most of these buildings are residential and a certain percentage of the apartments must be made available for low cost family housing.
After leaving the island and returning to Vancouver by way of the Cambie Street Bridge we cycled through China Town, which is no longer the center of Chinese life in Vancouver. Most of the Chinese have moved to Richmond where their cultural influence is dominant, but we never made it there. This is the area where you see a lot of homeless people and people obviously on drugs. Nothing like San Francisco, but enough to make walking in the area a little uncomfortable.
Robert stopped to show us the narrowest building in the world, which you can see here. The shops are only a few feet deep because the building was divided when two brothers quarreled and one brother got the street frontage but only very little of the building. A decision worthy of Solomon!
We continued on through Gastown, stopping along the way to learn interesting things about the city and its people and eventually returned to the point where we had started four hours before. We had a great time and it was the perfect orientation to Vancouver.