Vancouver, Canada

We kept being reminded of the cold weather in Vancouver while we were on the plane trip...we weren't looking forward to it. When we arrived however, it was beautifully sunny with blue skies - still that mountain chill lingers in the air because of the surrounding ranges. We paid some duty tax because we were over the free limit for Canada (honest little travellers we were....we were afraid because of all the stories we had heard about customs, but in the end we could have walked through without a second glance!! But...we didn't want to risk our souvenirs being confiscated, and any fine we got would have been much worse than the duty we paid!!) We arrived at our hotel - which we booked in advance on a cheap net rate - and found we had one of the biggest and best rooms in the place!!

We are just outside the city - but it's a lot smaller than we imagined and walking into the CBD only took us about 20 minutes. We walked into town on our second day here, and it started pouring rain (quite normal here....) lucky we came across a theatre showing films from the Vancouver Intl Film Festival. We watched a Canadian film about Easter Bunnies called Hank & Mike. It was good fun and got us out of the rain!!



On the way home we stopped at a nice upper market car-yard to check out the Jeeps / Dodges / Chryslers. The car salesman (called Prince...) showed us around the new SUV's & took us for test drives in the new jeep Grand Cherokees (we did tell him we had just moved to Vancouver and were looking to spend around $50,000 on a new recreation vehicle for ourselves....whoops!! It was a Sunday and he had nothing else to do any way!!)



When we left Germany, we flew 10 hours but arrived here an hour after we left. (time difference....). Dee has had a hard time adjusting to the new time zone after being in Europe for so long, and the first couple of nights kept crashing out by 6pm. She is trying hard to stay up 'late' - at least until 8! The first couple of nights she was awake at 2 - 3 am again ready for the day.....after five days we have almost caught up with ourselves. We have walked around the area here and found a great little second hand book shop (for Dee) with a great second hand comic store (for Ivar) right next door, and a nice coffee shop to drink tea in and read our old books. The area is quite nice and very reminiscent of inner Sydney. We found a nice little Thai place with great lunch specials, a laundromat for our clothes and a bargain supermarket.



Tomorrow we leave our hotel here for a CBD hotel, where we are right in the middle of the main strips. We are looking forward to being a little closer to the shops and city life, where we will have 5 days to check out the city before flying to Hawaii!!